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PREFACE. IT has for a long time past been customary for Parliament in passing an Act to authorise the Queen in Council or a Govern- ment Department to make Orders, Rules, or Regulations for the purpose of carrying the provisions of the Act into effect, by establishing procedure, or forms or tables of fees, or otherwise.

These Orders, Rules, or Regulations (which may be referred to generally as "Orders") are now numerous and important. They are, when duly made, tantamount to Acts of Parliament, and in many cases the Act giving the authority to make the Order specifically declares that the Order when made shall have effect as if enacted in the Act.

The Orders have not hitherto been published in a systematic manner, some of them appearing in official documents, such as the London Gazette or a Parliamentary Paper or a Stationery Office Publication, while a portion of them can only be found either in papers printed for the department concerned, and circulated by the departinent among the authorities or persons immediately interested, or in text books.

This want of systematic publication has often made it difficult to discover when and how the statutory power of making "Orders" has been most recently exercised.

To meet this difficulty the Lord Chancellor and the Treasury have directed the publication henceforward of all "Orders which are of a Public and General character in an annual volume uniform with the official annual volume of the Statutes.

The present, which is the first of these annual volumes, contains the "Orders" made during 1890.

The volume, which has been edited by Mr. A. Pulling, Junior, of the Inner Temple, under the direction of the Statute Law Committee, and with the assistance of the Government Depart- ments concerned in making the Orders, is strictly limited to Orders which are authorised by a specific statute, and does not extend to any Orders, Rules, or Regulations (such as most of those for the Army) which are made independently of any statutory power.

It is also limited to Orders of public and general interest, and does not contain those of a local, personal, or temporary character the distinction between the two classes of Orders follows in the main the distinction between public and local Acts.

At the commencement of the volume will be found a Chronological Table of the "Orders" contained in it, and a further