The condition of land titles leaves much to be desired. All titles are supposed to be derived from original grants by the crown or the government of the Republic. As there is no record extant of such grants and as much land has been acquired by adverse possession, the amount of land remaining to the state cannot even be the subject of an intelligent guess. The greater part of such land passed to the Republic as successor to the Spanish crown, another portion was added in 1844 by the confiscation of property belonging to Haitians, but no attempt has ever been made to survey or even to list state lands. According to some estimates the state owns as much as one or even two-fifths the area of the Republic, but it is probable that these estimates are exaggerated and almost the only tracts remaining to the government are situated in the inaccessible mountain region of the interior and along the Haitian border. The income of the Republic is still insufficient to leave money for the investigation of public lands, and every year's delay will permit more of such lands to be absorbed by private persons. A large portion of the rural land is held in common. Tracts originally belonging to one owner descended undivided among his heirs for generations, individual heirs sometimes sold their shares, and the result is that often the tract belongs in common to many persons, some of them holding very small shares. The shares of the co-owners are known as "pesos de posesion," "dollars of possession," corresponding to the value given them at some remote period. The owner of any undivided portion of such "comunero" property, though he hold only one or two shares or "pesos de posesion," may enter upon and cultivate any part of the land he finds unoccupied by other co-owners, and use anything growing or existing thereon, except certain timber or unless it be the result of the labor of other co-owners. That this peculiar mode of enjoying the comunero property has not resulted in friction and conflicts may be ascribed to the smallness of the cultivated fields, the small population and the enormous expanse of vacant land. For the prospective purchaser the doubts surrounding the title to comunero lands are enhanced by the existence of fraudulent "peso" titles and by the destruction of public offices where title transfers should have been recorded. In recent years much division of comunero land among the co-owners has been going on and such action is facilitated by a law of 1911, but the importance of the matter merits additional laws to cheapen and hasten the division.