STUDIES that have been made of land sales by the national government in the pre-Civil War period -among others those of Donaldson, Treat, and most recently Hibbard have presented the general course of the movement. Such statistics as these writers have advanced indicate that there were three occasions when the volume of sales reached particularly great heights. These occasions were the years preceding the crises of I8I9, I837, and I857. At these several times, speculation was rampant and the rush of purchasers to the local governmental agencies was so great that feverish activity of any sort came thereafter to be commonly described as doing a land-office business. But these accounts of land sales fail in several respects to give as full a picture of this important phenomenon as could be wished. Based on annual data, they do not show the timing of the speculative movements with a closeness desirable for the study of business cycles. As the course of commodity prices and other statistical series has been exhibited, or will shortly be exhibited, upon a monthly basis, there is reason for wishing the course of this speculative series of land sales to be available upon at least a quarterly basis.2 Secondly, since previous studies have presented data only for the country as a whole, little is definitely known as to the course of sales in the several sections of the country, especially as to the particular areas in the nation most affected at the different periods of speculative buying. Fortunately there exists in the records of the General Land Office material which makes possible a thorough study. The books of this Office give data by quarterly periods of the moneys received and deposited in the Treasury by the numerous local land offices, as shown by accounts submitted by such periods to the General Land Office in Washington. These data extend as far back as i8oi, but before i8i6 they are not full enough for our purpose except for particular areas since the reports do not become regular by quarters until this later date. However, covering the 45-year interval i8i6-6o, they embrace the occasions of the chief speculative activities, as far as land sales are concerned, and, indeed, the important periods of general speculative activity in the decades before the Civil War. Moreover, these financial items can be supplemented and tested by statistics of the quantity of land sold appearing in the annual reports of the Commissioner. These data also apply to the several land offices and are presented first I820 to i845 as single annual data, but later after i845 by half-yearly periods. By means of these two sets of figures, one can ascertain not only the significance in money terms of total land sales by the relatively short periods of quarter-years, but also receipts by each land office for similarly brief periods and the acreage sold office by office each year or half-year. For the interpretation of cyclical movements in the sale of public lands and for the determination of the sectional variation in these sales, such detailed statistics are invaluable. In the analysis here made of the new data, some simplification of the material has been thought advantageous, and this has been accomplished by grouping together the statistics relating to the land offices located in each of the several states, and by employing only the summations of moneys received or acreage sold in each group of offices for the various time periods. Since the boundaries of land districts (over each of which a single land office had control) usually did not extend over state lines, this method of operation serves merely to divide the country