The Institute of Actuaries has always been ready to welcome contributions from members able to give information regarding the mortality found to prevail among special classes of lives, and among lives resident in other parts of the world than Great Britain. The authors of the present paper having had occasion to look closely into the subject of West Indian mortality, chiefly in connection with the financial affairs of the Barbados Mutual Life Assurance Society, have therefore willingly responded to an invitation to lay before the members of the Institute some account of the statistics which they have been able to gather, and of the conclusions at which they have arrived. They desire, in the first place, to express their thanks to the directors of the Barbados Mutual Society for permitting them to publish the results of the society's mortality experience, and to Mr. Spencer C. Thomson, the manager of the Standard Life Office, for some valuable statistics relating to the experience of that office regarding West Indian mortality.

In a paper which I read before the Society in 1879, I gave the results of an investigation I had made with the object of determining the probability, that a man marrying at any age over 40, will, or will not, have children; and I have now extended the same enquiry to men of all ages. The statistics upon which my former conclusions rested, related to 339 marriages entered into by peers and their near relations above the age of 40, and were extracted from Lodge's Peerage for the year 1871. For all statistical enquiries this work is, in my opinion, greatly preferable to any of the other works that give records of the British Peerage. The principal ground for this opinion is, that Lodge usually gives the dates of birth of the daughters of each family, as well as those of the sons; whereas other Peerages generally omit those dates, and place the names of the daughters (without any dates) after the names of the sons, so that it is impossible to tell whether they are older or younger than their brothers. In the case of a few families this practice is also adopted in Lodge, presumably by special desire of the head of the family; and it is a matter of regret that this, together with other circumstances to be presently mentioned, diminishes the value of the book for statistical purposes.