(No. 2.)
Extract from Minute of His Excellency the Governor.

The Regulations the Government intend to adopt are as follow:—

"The choice of any one of three modes of proceeding will be left open to all the claimants: (1) Either to avail themselves of the provisions of the instructions from Her Majesty's Government, which I have now laid on the table; or (2) to avail themselves of the provisions of the local Ordinance (No. 22, Sess. VII.) to authorize compensation in colonial debentures to be made to certain claimants to land in the Colony of New Zealand; or (3) to avail themselves of the following regulations, which the Government are prepared to adopt.

"The Government will issue at once to all claimants under the ten-shillings-an-acre Proclamation (who complied strictly with the terms of the Government notice of the 15th June, 1846), and whose claims have been already investigated or may hereafter be investigated by the Commissioner, and favourably reported upon-by him, absolute Crown grants, in the usual form, on their paying within one month from the date of the report of the Commissioner the remainder of the fees due. The grants to include the reserve-tenths (at £1 per acre) in cases where the whole quantity granted does not exceed 200 acres. The same rule will be extended to the penny-an-acre claimants for blocks not exceeding 500 acres (whether the land may be cultivated or not), whose claims have been, or may hereafter be, favourably reported upon by the Commissioner, on their paying 5s. an acre within the same period of time.

"The same grant, and a title upon the same terms, will be issued to all the penny-an-acre claimants in whose favour the Crown's right of pre-emption may have been waived over more than 500 acres of land; but in these cases the quantity of land granted (on which alone the fee will be demandable) will never exceed 500 acres, and any title which the claimant may have acquired over the remaining portion of the claim will remain in the Crown; but the Government will not undertake to extend this last rule to a distance from the Town of Auckland exceeding twenty miles. It must also be distinctly understood that the Government will in no case extend the rules relating to the penny-an-acre claims to those eases in which there is any probability of the title to the land being justly disputed by the adverse Native claimants. The fee of 5s. an acre demanded upon claims of this character is intended to cover the expenses of the Commissioner's Court, the Government surveys, and to satisfy any Native claimant who may afterwards appear, the Government, by giving an absolute title, taking upon itself to make the title good."