168 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



had been sold in the last century. These annuities may be briefly 

 described as the paying of a certain annual sum for a number of 

 years calculated on the probable number of years the annuitant 

 may live, in return for a " lump sum " given by him to the Gov- 

 ernment. Several such series of annuities had been issued by the 

 Government when in dire distress for funds, and found highly 

 profitable ; but now it became apparent that the Government was 

 losing money, and a searching incpiiry by authorized experts, 

 plainly showed that the men who were receiving the annuities 

 were living too long a state of things that demanded reform; 

 and, as wholesale murder could not be indulged in, the problem 

 was attacked from the other side, and by a more extended and 

 careful set of investigations an equitable basis for the issuance 

 of future annuities was found. At this time it was clearly shown 

 that the duration of life in 1725 compared to that in 1825 was as 

 three in the former to four in the later time. 



We, who are born into this age of tabulated statistics, can 

 form but a feeble notion of the slender grounds on which those 

 misleading annuities were founded. True, more than five hun- 

 dred years B. c. the Romans had begun a register of citizens, 

 including sex and the dates of birth and death, which was con- 

 tinued for a thousand years ; and, from a study of it, the average 

 period of human life was computed at thirty years. There are 

 no life-tables at all reliable now that are over fifty years old. 

 The first English census worthy of the name was taken in 1851 ; 

 but it is a curious and valuable circumstance that while Geneva in 

 Switzerland was undergoing the inevitable ferment caused by the 

 presence of such an agitator as John Calvin, she did, in 1551 just 

 three centuries ahead of England set up such a recording and 

 tabulation of her citizens as makes the records invaluable as a 

 means of comparison, and shows that, from a death-rate of forty 

 in the thousand previous to 1G00, it had fallen before 1800 to 

 twenty-nine in the thousand, and there has been a steady decrease 

 since ; so that the average of human life in that city was com- 

 puted fifty years ago at more than forty-five years a gain of one 

 half over the Roman average. 



France also set herself at the problem of life-values. Baron 

 Delessert the founder of the Philanthropic Society of Paris 

 found that the annual death-rate in that city during the age of 

 chivalry the fourteenth century was one in sixteen ; during the 

 seventeenth, one in twenty-six ; and in 1824, one in thirty-two. 

 Taking all of France together, the deaths during 1781 were one in 

 twenty-nine ; but in the five years preceding 1829 they were one 

 in thirty-nine. Thus the value of life in France had nearly 

 doubled since " the good old times." 



It was next found that, in the prisons of England, which were 



