Observations on Bills of Mortality. 309 



1832, 590, 



The useful and practical bearing of the improvement I sug- 

 gest, if adopted, would be the enabling any one to form a just 

 estimate of the health of a country or city, and secondly to 

 establish a basis for premiums on life insurance. Persons desir- 

 ous to do either would naturally first ascertain the population of 

 the place, then the number of deaths annually, and from these 

 data would calculate the proportion of one to the other, and 

 draw his conclusions therefrom. A series of years, say twenty, 

 would of course be taken. Now any one may easily imagine 

 the magnitude of the influence in favor of or against the char- 

 acter of a country or city for salubrity, which the retention or 

 rejection of the proscribed causes and places of death must have 

 upon the result. In the one case a numerous list of these causes, 

 altogether accidental and adventitious, will lead to unfair con- 

 clusions on the point in question, while in the other, none but 

 such as may be termed legitimate would be taken into consider- 

 ation. Upon the first mode of procedure, Philadelphia, for in- 

 stance, would show an alarming but unjust disproportion of 

 deaths to its population, and if the result were to determine the 

 premium of life insurance in an European office upon a resident 

 in it, a high one (if any risk were taken)* must necessarily be 



* It is probable that owing to a conclusion or calculation of the increased risk of 

 life in liie United States, and founded on the great proportion of deaths to the 



