It is with considerable diffidence that I submit this paper to the Institute seeing that there are many members who are far better qualified to deal with the subject.

However, it was suggested that a paper of this character would be acceptable, and I have endeavoured to make it as complete as possible without transgressing reasonable limits of space.

In the first place I have given a general account of the law of bankruptcy, following, in the main, the general arrangement of the subject adopted by Ringwood in “The Principles of Bankruptcy”, and I hope sufficiently full to make the paper useful to Students for Part IV of the examination syllabus. This has inevitably made it somewhat long and formal.

The following notes are an attempt to show

(1) How select and aggregate rates of mortality can be found from insurance office data by the methods at present used to find rates of mortality from censuses and the records of deaths among the general population, and

(2)How the census method can be modified in the case of a prolonged investigation to give a continuous mortality investigation.

We have also tried to deal with a few of the objections to the method, and some of the practical points that arise in its application.