158 ESSAY ON PROBABILITIES. 



yet introduced into the affairs of common life, though 

 many cases occur in which it might be made useful. 

 But many things which are only demonstrable by the 

 higher branches of mathematics are looked upon as 

 useless by those who do not understand them ; nor 

 is this result of ignorance only to be looked for 

 among the uneducated. While the Reform Bill was 

 in its progress through the House of Commons,, a 

 method was suggested by a man of science, with whom 

 the government advised upon the subject, for esti- 

 mating the relative importance of boroughs by con. 

 sidering their population and contributions to the 

 revenue combinedly. This method, to the efficiency of 

 which most of those who examined it gave strong testi- 

 mony, was ridiculed by some members of the house, 

 partly because it involved decimal fractions, and partly 

 because another and a more simple (but palpably 

 wrong) method gave, in that particular case, nearly the 

 same results. When legislators are neither able to see 

 that erroneous methods may sometimes lead to truth, 

 being not therefore one bit the less erroneous, nor that 

 the truth of a result is the same, whether decimal or 

 common fractions be employed, it is little to be won- 

 dered at if useful applications of abstract reasoning 

 are looked upon with suspicion and introduced with 

 difficulty. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



ON THE APPLICATION OF PROBABILITIES TO LIFE CON- 

 TINGENCIES. 



WHEN questions connected with life contingencies were 

 first considered, it was regarded as most deliberate 

 gambling to be in any way concerned in buying or 

 selling such articles as annuities, or any interests 

 depending upon them. Before we can well enter upon 



