62

MORTALITY AMONGST SOLDIERS.

the country and the villages, and exposes them to the greater temptations which large towns afford, at a very critical period of their lives.

The greater mortality, however, amongst soldiers is for the most part but an apparent result, and is but a particular form in which the general fact displays itself of the rate of mortality receiving a sudden increment about the age of military service. M. Demonferrand has observed that the general rate of mortality decreases from the first year to the fourteenth, after which it increases again gradually to the eighteenth, from which year up to the twenty-fifth it receives a much more rapid augmentation, when it again begins to diminish up to the forty-first. Thus, out of 10,000 youths who reached the age of eighteen, he found that not more than 8885 attained their thirtieth year but if the rate of mortality had not augmented in a greater ratio than during the preceding four years, there would have been 9174 survivors. The general increased mortality of this period, therefore, alone entailed a loss of 289 out of every 10,000 lives. The mortality, therefore, amongst 10,000 soldiers, when compared with that amongst 10,000 of the inhabitants at large irrespectively of their age, would inevitably be greater from this circumstance alone.

In instituting a comparison, in the previous

Lecture, between the expectation of life, which is given in the most carefully constructed modern life tables both in England and in France, and that which is exhibited in Dr. Price's Northampton Tables on the one hand, and in Duvillard's Tables on the other, I selected Dr. Price's Tables as the oldest English life tables, and Duvillard's as the only French life tables, in which the general law of mortality at about the same period was professed to be represented. There are, however, other tables in both countries, constructed upon very different data, and in which the results are very much more favourable to vitality: I allude to the Carlisle Tables, and the Tables of M. Deparcieux. The latter writer published in 1746 an Essay "Sur les Probabilités de la Durée de la Vie humaine," accompanied by six tables of mortality. The observations upon which the first table was constructed, had been made on the nominees of two Tontines in France, created in 1689 and 1696 respectively. The use of the term Tontine, so well known to the generation of the past century, is now almost confined to history, and as its meaning may not be familiar, its origin may deserve a brief explanation. Early in the reign of Louis XIV. of France, soon after he had attained his majority, and recalled Cardinal Mazarin as Prime Minister to his councils, and appointed

Fouquet "Surintendant des Finances," an Italian of the name of Tonti suggested a method of raising a state-loan by an association of lifeannuitants on these terms: that the surplus dividends accruing on the deaths of individual annuitants should be distributed amongst the surviving subscribers, until the whole body should become extinct. Mazarin's administration was but a series of financial expedients, so that such a proposal found a ready welcome, and for some time this method of raising money for public works, or the necessities of the government, was successful. But as this system involved a speculation on the part of each indi vidual against his neighbour's life, and the selflove of man, even in this respect, could not but lead him to undervalue his neighbour's chance of living as compared with his own, and the supposed laws of mortality, upon which the calculations were based, were occasionally far from correct, the nominees in some cases became discontented with the unreasonable longevity of their fellow subscribers. Thus, in regard to the three Irish Tontines in our own country, which were created in the years 1773, 1775, and 1778, assertions that nominees were sometimes fraudulently personated after their death, and their dividends un warrantably drawn for a series of years, so far prevailed at the beginning of the present cen

tury, that a select Parliamentary Committee was appointed to inquire into the fact, and the result was a report that the mortality had not been so rapid as the calculations of Dr. Price had led the subscribers to expect. Mr. Finlaison, the actuary of the National Debt, in his Report on the law of mortality of the Government Life Annuitants, states that there is abundant evidence in the subsequent observations, that the subscribers did not die off so fast as Dr. Price had predicted.

Four of the remaining tables of Deparcieux were founded on the observations of the mortality amongst monks of different orders in France, and the fifth represented the mortality amongst the nuns of several convents in Paris from 1685 to 1745. These were amongst the earliest tables of mortality constructed for the two sexes separately, and by them the greater longevity of the female sex was made evident, — a fact already noticed by M. Kerseboom, in his Essay, in the Dutch language, "On the probable Number of Persons in Holland and West Friesland," published in 1738, of which a notice by Mr. Eames may be found in the Philosophical Transactions for that year. They could, however, be of comparatively little value in determining the general law of mortality, from the peculiar habits of life of the individuals, as it

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66

DEFECTIVE DATA OF TONTINES.

appeared that the mortality amongst these classes was below the average under 50 years of age; but after that time, above the average, and considerably so in the case of the nuns. Deparcieux, therefore, calculated his life table from the mortality amongst the Tontinists. But in both series of observations, he had no data beyond the age of those who died. "He had not even the advantage of personal access to the original record of the two Tontines, but compiled his facts from the file of flying sheets, which, in the case of all Tontines, used to be published periodically, to announce the deaths of nominees. But in no case whatever did he receive information either of the sex, or even of the age of the nominee, either at entry or at death, or at surviving, because the Tontinists were in classes, persons from 5 to 10 being in one class, from 10 to 15 in another, and so on, without any mention of the particular number enrolled or dying at each or every age." M. Finlaison considers that such imperfect data could hardly furnish a sufficient approximation to the truth, although the facts were very numerous; and in computing an observation on the two Tontines separately, he found that the rate of mortality after forty years in one was very different from that in the other.

One strong theoretical objection against the life