276 The Correct Arms of the State of Neiu York. 



inof, while the necessities of the State for a seal continued. Accord- 

 ingly on September 10 of the same year, Gov. Clinton and Chancellor 

 Livingston were appointed to attend to the same duty and to order 

 a seal to be made. I am indebted for the reference to the Journal of 

 the convention for this fact to Mr. Edward F. De Lancey of New 

 York. It was voted that in the mean time the seal of the Governor 

 be the great seal of the State. This is the seal which is called in sec- 

 tion 1 of the law of 1??8. the Governor's seal at Arms," that is, 

 his seal with his family Arms upon it, such as each one of the colonial 

 governors had been in the habit of using. It appears from the 

 Journal of the convention, December 31, 1777, that the seal was 

 actually finished, and adopted in that year, and on that day. And it 

 was this seal which served as a basis for the " Arms complete " men- 

 tioned, and adopted in the law of March 16, 1778. There is no re- 

 cord so far as is known what was the measure of cooperation of any 

 one of these five men, in producing the device of Arms as we this 

 day find it, with which their honored names will be forever associa- 

 ted. Instead therefore of three, as I reported in 1879, we have five 

 of the most eminent men of the State, associated in this measure of 

 revolution and republican independence, a measure Avhich was sanc- 

 tioned by all who constituted the provincial congress of the day. 



6. In my first paper on the Arms, I argued that the water between 

 mountains, and a meadow at the base on the military commission, in- 

 dicated a river, not the sea, and that river the Hudson river, with 

 vessels of commerce upon it. But it will be remembered that on the 

 paintings of the regimental flag, and of St. Paul's Chapel, the water 

 extends to the very base of the shield, and those paintings do not rep- 

 resent the meadow ; hence if, in the reconstructed Arms of the 

 State, nothing was to be retained which did not have the testimony in 

 its favor of two of these three witnesses, the meadow or fringe of 

 land would have to disappear as being merely an invention of the 

 engraver, and without authority. 



Now it is one of the results of the investigations of the last year, 

 that it is clearly established from the examination of many specimens 

 of impressions upon wax of the great seal of the State, and attached 

 to deeds and other papers from 1777 to 1798, that they have this 

 frino:e of meadow-land at the base of the shield. This fact conclu- 

 sively shows, that the great seal which was the original, and proto- 

 type of the shield of the complete Arms of the State, was closely imi- 

 tated by the engraver of the military commission. 



The seal having been made under the authority of a resolution of 

 the convention of September 10, 1777, we have in it a second and 



