[1026] Ibid., 362 (Mch. 14, 1660).
[1027] Ibid., 379 (May 15, 1662).
[1028] Ibid., II, 129 (May 12, 1670).
[1029] Ibid., 292, note.
[1030] Ibid., 292 (Oct. 21, 1676).
[1031] Ibid., 293 (Oct. 18, 1677). For two cases of divorce, each for six years' desertion, see ibid., 293 (Oct. 12, 1676), 322 (Oct. 11, 1677); one for five years' desertion, ibid., 327 (Oct. 18, 1677); and another for three years' "wilful" desertion, ibid., III, 23 (1678).
[1032] Conn. Col. Rec., IV, 37 (Oct. 9, 1690).
[1033] Ibid., 52, 53 (May, 1691).
[1034] Ibid., 59 (Oct. 8, 1691).
[1035] In a pamphlet entitled Appeal to the Public (New Haven, 1788), full of errors, Trumbull attacks the divorce laws of his state. According to him (48), there is no example of divorce in New York from the settlement to 1787; and with equal inaccuracy he declares (46) that "in the Massachusetts and Connecticut codes printed at Cambridge 1672, there is no law respecting divorce. The law of Connecticut relating to it was made five years after, Oct. 11, 1677." For Connecticut he makes the further extraordinary statement (46) that "more than forty years from the settlement" elapsed "before any such law was in existence. No divorce was given by virtue of the law, till the year 1692. After this divorces were, for many years, sparingly given. But as they became customary, as there were no punishments for delinquents, and as the shame decreased with the growth of the practice, they have, within this few years, had a rapid increase. In less than a century [1692-1788], four hundred and thirty-nine (439) pair ... have been separated by divorce. This whole number, forty-eight couple excepted, have been divorced in the short term of fifty-two years. Between twenty and thirty pair ... are now annually "thus separated" in the Superior Court, besides those put asunder by the General Assembly. About twenty times as many are now divorced annually, as were in almost sixty years after the first settlement of the State; and about half as many as were divorced through the whole first century. Seventeen pair have been divorced last circuit." It is to be hoped that the statistics are more trustworthy than the history.