H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 195 
suggest that in his time the duration of life of those who survived the 
vicissitudes of infancy and early adult life was much the same as at the 
present day. The great gain has been that more now live to middle age 
or beyond. Macdonell and Pearson analysed the data on mummy cases 
from the time of the Roman occupation of Egypt! and the ‘ Corpus 
Inscriptionum Latinarum ’ of the Berlin Academy,! which gives the age 
at death of some thousands of Roman citizens who had lived either in the 
City of Rome or the provinces such as Africa, at the early part of the 
Christian era, and were able to construct rough life tables indicating the 
probable expectation of life at different ages. These may be compared 
with tables constructed by Halley on the data in the bills of mortality 
of seventeenth-century Breslau, by Milne for eighteenth-century Carlisle,’* 
and with those constructed on modern census and registration data. 
AVERAGE EXprEcTATION OF Lire ror Eacu Person LiIvinG AT THE 
BEGINNING OF THE AGE INTERVAL, IN YEARS. 
| Place and Roman | Imperial Roman | Breslau | Carlisle | London!® 
period Egypt Rome Africa | 17Cent. | 18 Cent. | 1920-1922 | 
ee ea “all 2 PR se ASE A NY a es eB 
Ave | 
0- ? 722 2247 Pe A allies Badin ranted 
peebintipis 3) 24 45) | 4d 51 59 
15- | 23 22 38 | 37 45 | 51 
25- | 23 20 34 30 38 | 42 
45- 16 19 | 25 19 | 25 | 26 
65- 10 12 15 10 12 12 
ee ul Av liv: REO AE ni 
The results show such an increase in the expectation of life at the 
earlier ages as to emphasise Karl Pearson’s comment on the Egyptian data : 
‘either man must have grown remarkably fitter to his environment or else 
he must have fitted his environment immeasurably better to himself.’ 
Even in the early days, however, the disadvantages of the more urban 
surroundings are evident in the lower span of life in the Imperial City as 
compared with the Roman provinces. That a similar difference existed 
in the British Isles is certain, though from lack of data detailed comparison 
is impracticable until the last century. 
The expectation of life varies from class to class much as does physique, 
being greater for the professional classes than for the agriculturist, for the 
agriculturist than for the miner, while the latter in turn is a better life than 
_ the tailor or the textile worker. From life tables based on the mortality 
experience of the years 1911-12, the expectation of life appears to be 
greater in the South than the North of England and to vary in each area 
with the degree of industrialism and urbanisation. It also seems when 
the data as to numbers of survivors are plotted on a map that there is a 
greater expectation in those areas which, at any rate until recent times, 
were occupied by a predominantly Nordic population. 
10 Pearson, K., Biometrika, vol. i., pp. 261-264. 
11 Macdonell, W. R., Biometrika, vol. ix., pp. 366-380. 
12 Pearl, R., Biology of Death, pp. 79-101. 
18 Unpublished data by courtesy of B. Spear. 
