OBITUARY NOTICES. 
471 
telegraph line. During these years he made several inven¬ 
tions, among which may be mentioned a white-flint tele¬ 
graph insulator, for which he received a bronze medal from 
the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics’ Association in 1853. 
In 1854 he gave up telegraphy in order to undertake for the 
New England Mutual Life Insurance Company the prepara¬ 
tion of tables of two-life survivorships, which comprised, 
when finished, about eighteen thousand logarithmic val¬ 
ues, computed on the basis of the London actuaries’ life 
table, at four per cent. Later on he was engaged in com¬ 
puting annuity, survivorship, and other tables, and in 1860 
he prepared a set of official “instructions concerning the 
registration of births, marriages, and deaths in Massachu¬ 
setts,” the latter work being done under the direction of 
Hon. Oliver Warner, then secretary of the Commonwealth. 
While in Boston he united with the late Uriah A. Boyden 
and others in investigating the claims of spiritualism, hyp¬ 
notism, etc., and, failing to find satisfactory evidence of the 
truth of these claims, he was ever after their emphatic 
opponent. 
Upon the breaking out of the civil war in 1861 he came 
to Washington as actuary of the United States Sanitary 
Commission, and of his work relating to the first battle of 
Bull Bun it has been said that probably “ there is no in¬ 
stance in history in which the causes of the loss of any con¬ 
siderable battle have been so thoroughly sifted and examined 
on the spot, and within a week after the disaster, and in 
which the minutest details affecting the result have been so 
carefully preserved and their influence so accurately noted.” 
Statistical work respecting the personnel and condition of the 
United States armies occupied him till 1863, when, as a 
delegate from the American Statistical Association, he at¬ 
tended the International Statistical Congress at Berlin. 
After the close of the congress he visited the German and 
Danish armies engaged in the Schleswig-Holstein war, 
which was then virtually over, and was afforded unusual 
opportunities for inspecting the hospitals and becoming 
