In order to be able more accurately and under different points of view to observe the law of mortality which prevails amongst the assured, I have, besides the usual observations from one calendar year to another, on which the above calculations are founded, arranged other observations, in which the assured are classified from one year of assurance to another. The date of the first policy issued on the life of a person is the period at which, in this register, he yearly advances from one year of age to another. The payment of the premium and continuation of the assurance in the Gotha Office is regularly made for one year: however, it is permitted (but only to persons assured for the whole term of life) to pay their premiums also at half yearly rates; but the second half yearly payment is only considered as delayed, and those who desire to withdraw have no claim to any return for the premiums they have paid until they have also made the second half yearly payment. The consequence of this is, that, with very few exceptions, persons withdraw only at the end of a year of assurance. All the assured persons enter at the beginning of a year, die in the course of one, or withdraw at the end of one. They are therefore, with the exception of the year of their death, always full years in the circle of observation. This arrangement requires no correction for admission and withdrawal, as was necessary in the former case, and affords therefore a greater accuracy. Besides, tables arranged in this way offer the means of being able to consider separately all persons assured at a certain age, and to compute the mortality for these persons by themselves, and likewise to determine the mortality for each period of the assurance from its commencement.

In a former Number we took occasion to direct attention, in general terms, to the unnecessarily high rates of premium charged for life assurance in India; we propose, in the present article, to present our readers with some further observations on the same subject.

Everybody who is in the habit of reading the newspapers must have been, if not enlightened, at least amused, by the claims to public support put forth in the advertisements of rival Insurance Companies. Ignorance of the theory and practice of life assurance is, even in England, profound and very nearly universal; but here this ignorance is in no small degree aggravated by the obscurity which is supposed to prevail on the subject of European mortality in India, and by the ambiguous and contradictory statements which continually meet our eye in newspapers and on the covers of magazines.