The Royal Proclamation of 1763, which constituted the province of Quebec after the peace signed in that year, defined the Southern boundary of Quebec as passing ‘along the Highlands which divide the rivers that empty themselves into the said river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the sea’. The Quebec Act of 1774 again defined the Southern boundary of Quebec as ‘along the Highlands which divide the rivers that empty themselves into the river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the sea, to a point in 45 degrees of Northern latitude on the Eastern bank of the River Connecticut’. In the Commission to the Governor of Nova Scotia issued in 1763, the Western boundary of Nova Scotia from the source of the St. Croix was defined ‘by a line drawn due North from thence to the Southern boundary of Our colony of Quebec’. Therefore the Treaty of 1783, in defining the international line as a line drawn from the source of the St. Croix ‘directly North to the aforesaid Highlands which divide the rivers that fall into the Atlantic Ocean from those which fall into the river St. Lawrence’, used the previous definitions of the Western boundary of Nova Scotia and the Southern boundary of Quebec. [Sidenote: The ‘North-West angle of Nova Scotia’.] There were only two new points in the wording of the Treaty. The first was that the sea was defined as the Atlantic Ocean, thereby excluding the Bay of Chaleurs, and possibly the Bay of Fundy also, which was, in the Treaty, at any rate according to the British contention, treated as separate from the Atlantic Ocean. The second was the importation of the words ‘the North-West angle of Nova Scotia.’ It was obvious that wherever the Western boundary of Nova Scotia met the Southern boundary of Quebec there must be such an angle, but the Treaty spoke of it as a fixed starting point from whence to draw the boundary line; it assumed that this angle rested on highlands which divided the waters that flowed into the Atlantic from those which were tributaries of the St. Lawrence; and it assumed also that it would be reached by a due North line from the source of the St. Croix river. So the inaccurate maps of the day testified, and so paper boundaries, already recognized, prescribed. When, however, the matter was put to the test of actual geography, it was found that a line drawn due North from the source of the St. Croix nowhere intersected a water parting between the St. Lawrence basin and that of the Atlantic Ocean. The sources of the rivers which run into the Atlantic were found to be far to the West of the Northern line from the St. Croix river, to the West of that line even if it had been drawn from the source of the South-Western branch of the St. Croix, and not, as the St. Croix Commission had drawn it, from the source of its more easterly branch. It was evident that the earlier documents, which the Treaty of 1783 had