and sexes of all that die are monthly delivered, and compared with the number of the births for five years last past, viz. 1687, 88, 89, 90, 91, seeming to be done with all the exactness and sincerity possible. The City of Breslau is the capital City of the Province of Silesia, ... and very nigh the latitude of Lond. It is very far from the sea, and as much a Mediterranean place as can be desired, whence the confluence of strangers is but small, and the manufacture of Linnen employs chiefly the poor people of the place, as well as of the country round about. For these reasons the people of this City seem most proper for a standard; and the rather for that the births do a small matter exceed the funerals. The only thing wanting is the number of the whole people, which in some measure I have endeavoured to supply by the comparison of the mort. of the people of all ages, which I shall from the said bills trace out with all the accuracy possible.

Then follows the T., the arrangement of which we have slightly modernized. Age Curt., we presume, stands for "Age Current."

This table Dr. Halley wished in effect to be interpreted thus: that of 1000 children aged 1 year, as many would live to attain the older ages respectively as were denoted by the numbers set opposite to those ages. From this it was to be argued that a child of 1 year old had precisely as many chances out of a thousand of attaining any particular age as there were survivors represented by the Table to attain that age. Nor was this relation confined to children of one year old. For as it was strictly a table representing consecutive survivors, so the "prospection" of a person of any specified age attaining an older specified age was distinctly denoted by as many chances of the number, commencing from such first age, as there were survivors attaining the older age.

Two examples by reference to the Table will suffice: thus, the chances of a child aged 1 year attaining 30 years of age would be represented by 531 chances out of 1000: and the chances of a person aged 20 attaining 40 would be 445 chances out of 598. In the same manner, mutatis mutandis, the chances of living and dying for all ages were easily ascertainable, the number of expectant survivors representing the chances of living, and the remainder, or the number who were not expected to survive, the chances of death.

These principles, self-evident as they may appear, yet really only became so when the Table of Mort. was created and arranged: and thus Dr. Halley by his simple arrangement effected the resolution of many questions by comparative inspection, which previously were wholly incapable of even approximate answers.

The preceding Table seems not only interesting to the general reader as the first complete Table of Mort. upon record, but also as constituting the first real step in the art of life-measurement. It may further be added, as a fair tribute to Dr. Halley's skill, that 150 years of subsequent consideration by the most eminent mathematicians of Europe have only tended to confirm the eligibility of the form primarily chosen, even the most modern Tables of Mort. being still arranged on the same principle.-Farren, 1844.

The reader must not overlook the fact that Graunt had adopted a very similar arrangement in his Table published thirty years previously. [MORT. TABLES.]

The following is an enumeration of the uses to which Dr. Halley considered his Table might be applied :

The first use hereof is to show the proportion of men able to bear arms in any multitude, which are those between 18 and 56 years. . . .

The second use of this T. is to show the differing degrees of mort., or rather vitality, in all ages.... Use III. If it be inquired of what number of years, it is an even lay that a person of any age shall die, this T. readily performs it; for if the number of persons living of the age proposed be halfed, it will be found by the T. at what year the said number is reduced to half by mort.; and that is the age to which it is an even wager that a person of the age proposed shall arrive before he die-as for instance: A person of 30 years of age is proposed, the number of that age is 531, the half thereof is 265, which number I find to be between 57 and 58 years, so that a man of 30 years may reasonably expect to live between 27 and 28 years.

Use IV. By what has been said, the price of ins. upon lives ought to be regulated; and the difference 24

VOL. I..

is discovered between the price of insuring the life of a man of 20 and 50. For example: It being 100
to I that a man of 20 dies not in a year, and but 38 to 1 for a man of 50 years of age.

Use V. On this depends the valuation of annu. upon lives.
Use VI. Two lives are likewise valuable by the same rule.
Use VII. Three lives are proposed.

...

...

The subject of Ins. Wagers was strong in the learned Doctor's mind when he wrote this summary. And it must be noted also that he speaks of the "price of ins. upon lives," clearly showing what indeed we now know, that life ins. was a matter of common practice at that period: but the insurances were for specific periods, and were undertaken by individual underwriters, in the same manner as marine policies were then, and are now, written. Dr. Halley adds a supplemental use or reflection, in the following form:

Besides the uses mentioned, it may perhaps not be an unacceptable thing to infer from the same T. how unjustly we repine at the shortness of our lives, and think ourselves wronged if we attain not old age; whereas it appears hereby that one half of those that are born are dead in 17 years' time, 1238 being in that time reduced to 616; so that instead of murmuring at what we call an untimely death, we ought, with patience and unconcern, to submit to that dissolution which is the necessary condition of our perishable materials, and of our nice and frail structure and composition, and to account it as a blessing that we have survived perhaps by many years that period of life whereat the one half of the whole race of mankind does not arrive.-Phil. Trans., No. 198, vol. xvii.

In our art. ANNUITIES UPON LIVES, we have already shown the important bearing which the results of this T. ought to have had upon all financial dealings of that character. To say that the Gov. of the day was very slow to profit by its teachings, although so much of the national finance was accomplished by means of L. annu., or that private individuals profited by using the obvious lessons of the T. to their individual advantages as against the Gov., is only to state that which all who are conversant with our financial history are already aware of. It took some years to make the advantages of a scientific mode of life measurement at all appreciated by those most concerned.

In Edward Lawrence's Dissertation on Estates for Lives, etc. (1730), Halley's Table was inserted and recommended for adoption in preference to the imaginary estimates on lives then current; and in the same year, John Richards, of Exeter, pub. Tables for valuing estates, leasehold and for lives, founded on Halley's estimate, and De Moivre's hypothesis.

In 1752 W. Dodson, F.R.S., submitted to the Royal So. some remarks on the decrement of life exhibited in the Breslau Table; and the same were pub. in the Phil. Trans. of that year.

In 1753 Kerseboom pub. : A view of the relation between the celebrated Dr. Halley's Tables, and the notions of M. de Buffon for estab. a rule for the prob. duration of the life of man. In the same year James Hardy's Complete System of Int. and Annu. contained annu. values deduced from this table.

De Moivre, in the 3rd ed. of his Doctrine of Chances, 1756, said "The first T. is that of Dr. Halley, composed from the bills of mort. in the city of Breslau; the best perhaps as well as the first of its kind; and which will always do honour to the judgment and sagacity of its excellent author." And then, after naming various other T., he returns to the Breslau T., and adds:

We may therefore retain this last as no bad standard for mankind in general, till a better police, in this and other nations, shall furnish the proper data for correcting it; and for expressing the decrements of life more accurately and in larger numbers.

Again :

The celebrated M. de Buffon has lately given us a new T. from the actual obs. of Mons. du Pré de St. Maur, of the French Academy. This gentleman, in order to strike a just mean, takes 3 populous parishes in the city of Paris and so many country villages as furnish him nearly an equal number of lives; and his care and accuracy in that performance have been such as to merit the high approbation of the learned editor.

He then details the steps he had taken for comparing this T. with Halley's, and adds: "There resulted only a mutual confirmation of the two tables; Mr. Du Pré's T. making the lives somewhat better as far as 39 years, and thence a small matter worse than they are by Dr. Halley's.

Benjamin Martin's Decimal Arithmetic, pub. 1763, contained a reprint of Halley's T., and the same indeed may be said of nearly all the works pub. before the appearance of the Northampton T.

It was a very general complaint by the writers of this period that the Breslau T. was not adapted to the purposes of annu. and ins. asso. founded in Lond. ; but the writers did not at all harmonize in their views as to the grounds of its unsuitability. Indeed, on the one hand, it was contended that in the small city of Breslau the value of life must be much greater than its value in the overgrown and plague-smitten city of Lond. ; while, on the other hand, it was contended that whatever the faults of Lond. might be, continental life could never be compared in point of healthfulness to that of English life, and it was very doubtful whether all continental cities had not a greater mort than Lond. We shall have occasion to notice some of these statements under LONDON, MORT. T. for.

The Laudable So. of Annuitants was founded in 1766. In a few years it was found that its promised advantages to its members were much too large in relation to the payments made by them to the So. A controversy arose; it was asserted on behalf of the founders of the So. that they had promised no more than the BRESLAU TABLE would

justify. An investigation into the mort. of the So. took place about 1775, and it was found that the real mort., for a period of about 7 years, was only a little more than half that predicted by this T.

Mr. Milne says [art. 'Annu.,' Encyclo. Brit.]:

That celebrated mathematician first gave a T. of Mort., which he had constructed from obs. made at Breslau, and showed how the prob. of life and death, and the values of annu. and assu. on lives, might be determined by such T.; which he informs us had till then been only done by an imaginary valuation.

In an art. upon Human Mort. in the same pub., Mr. Milne further says:

The Breslau bills appear to have been the first wherein the ages at which the deaths took place were inserted; and the most important information which B. of Mort. can afford was first drawn from them by Dr. Halley.

In the 5th report of Reg.-Gen. (1843) are the following judicious observations: Halley's T. was calculated on the deaths in the City of Breslau, which for various reasons he selected, from the imperfect data at his disposal, "as the most proper for a standard, and the rather for that the births did a small number exceed the funerals." He was aware that he wanted the number of the whole people for an accurate calculation; but Halley's T., constructed upon nearly the same hypothesis as the Northampton T., represented the mort. of mankind with as little inaccuracy, and was upon the whole as good a standard. He observes, "It may be objected that the different salubrity of places does hinder the proposal from being universal, nor can it be denied;" but "it is desirable that, in imitation hereof, the curious in other cities would attempt something of the same nature, than which nothing perhaps can be more useful."

Mr. W. T. Thomson says [Proof-Sheets, 1856]:

The T. of Dr. Halley is arranged exactly in the same form as the Mort. T. of the present day, and shows the numbers living at each age, being the first T. of the kind.

The following is the Breslau T. in a complete form, showing the expectation of life at all ages:

[LIFE INS., HIST. OF.] [LOND. MORT. T.] [MORT. T., HIST. OF.] BREST.-A seaport on the extreme western coast of France, and for a long period the chief naval station of that country. In 1744 its magazines were destroyed, causing a loss of many millions sterling in stores. In 1766 another fire occurred, destroying the marine hospital. In 1784 the magazine was again destroyed by fire. But the chief interest centres in the place from the fact of its having been for many years the usual limit southwards to which lives insured were allowed to travel without payment of extra prem. seems to provoke almost a smile of derision now; yet before steam-navigation was so extended and efficient, as it has since become, there was something to be said in favour of such limitation. Besides, the place stands sentinel over the much-dreaded Bay of Biscay. [FOREIGN RESIDENCE, etc.]

This

BRETTLE, JOSEPH C., was Sec. of Royal Naval and Military, etc., Life, for some years, down to 1853.

BREVE.-A writ by which a person is summoned or attached to answer an action, complaint, etc., or whereby anything is commanded to be done in the Courts, in order to justice, etc. It is called breve from the brevity of it. Wharton.

BREVE CONSULUM MARIS.-A manual compiled for the magistrates of Pisa entrusted with the administration of the maritime jurisdiction, in which were minutely explained the rules and the forms which they were to observe in the exercise of their functions. A manual of this description existed in the middle of the 13th century. There were also the Breve Curia Artium; the Breve Curiæ maris; and the Breve Consulum Curia Mercatorum, continuations and later modifications of the above. [PISA, MARITIME STATUTES OF.]

BREVE PORTUS CALLERITANI (Cagliari), compiled in 1318 by the commissioners of the Republic of Pisa, which had then long had estab. Courts [? Consular Courts] in Sardinia. [MARINE INS., HIST. OF.]

BREWERS', DISTILLERS', LICENSED VICTUALLERS', AND GENERAL LIFE AND FIRE ASSU., AND LOAN AND ENDOW. Co., founded in 1851, on the proprietary principle, with an authorized cap. of £125,000, in shares of £10. About £56,000 of its cap. was subs. The paid-up cap. was returned as £2960, which was soon lost, and calls were made upon the shareholders to close up the affairs of the Co.

Its first and last payment on F. duty amounted to £89 15s. 3d.; this was made in the Dec. quarter of 1851.

BREWERS' DRAYMEN.-In a paper by Mr. H. W. Porter, B. A., which appeared in the 9th vol. of Assu. Mag. [1860], On some Considerations suggested by the Ann. Reports of the Reg.-Gen., being an Inquiry into the Question as to how far the Inordinate Mort. in this Country, exhibited by those Reports, is Controllable by Human Agency, we find the following instructive remarks:

The Registrar observes, that the red injected face of the butcher is an indication of disease-to the ordinary observer this might be an indication of robust health. Similarly with respect to brewers' draymen, their appearance would indicate that they were blessed with strong constitutions; this is not however the case. It is found in the hospitals that these men are a very difficult class to treat when attacked with inflammatory symptoms; and they are very prone to such attacks, and succumb readily to them. Their horses, which are often good matches for their masters in appearance, have very much the same attributes as the men; and as the draymen prob. acquire their peculiarity of appearance, and of constitution, from the quantity of beer they imbibe, and owing to the insufficient amount of active walking exercise they take in proportion to their potations, so perhaps are the horses affected by much the same causes, by being fed to some extent on the brewers' grains, which act no doubt on their livers as the beer does on those of their masters. . . .

BRIDGES, WILLIAM, was Sec. of Universal Emigration and Colonization Ins. Co. at its commencement in 1849. In 1850 he became Act. and Sec. of the Mitre L., which position he retained until 1859. In 1854 he was advertised as Act. of the Ark (No. 2). He subsequently became Sec. of the Friendly Sos. Inst. He pub. in 1850, Freehold Assu, and the Farmer's Estate So.

BRIEFS [usually called King's or Queen's briefs] are licences to make collection for repairing churches, restoring loss by fire, etc. Several centuries since these briefs were of very frequent use, as will be seen in our hist. of FIRE INS. Before F. ins. became general, a large fire hardly ever occurred without these documents being called into requisition. In 1705 was passed, the 4th Anne c. 14, An Act for the better collecting Charity Money on Briefs by Letters Patent, and preventing abuses in relation to such charities. Wherein it is recited: "Whereas many inconveniences do arise, and frauds are committed in the common method of collecting charity money upon briefs by letters patent, to the great trouble of the objects of such charity, and to the great discouragement of well-disposed persons.' For remedy whereof it was provided that from 25th March, 1706, all copies of briefs for collecting charity money should be printed by the Queen's printers. Ministers of churches and of chapels, on some Sunday within 2 months after receipt of copy of brief, were to openly read the same before the sermon. The churchwardens were to indorse on brief the amount collected, and remit the same with brief to the "undertaker" employed in the matter. These undertakers were men appointed for working the particular charity to which the brief related, and were paid a commission on the proceeds. They were liable to penalties if they failed to comply with the provisions of this Act. All the returned briefs were to be deposited with the Reg. of the Court of Chancery. The Act further recites: "And whereas there hath been an evil practice in farming and purchasing for a sum of money that should or might be collected on such briefs, to the very great hindrance and discouragement of almsgiving on such occasion." The Act forbade such practices thereafter. BRIG.-The general term for a vessel having two masts, with a boom mainsail, being otherwise square-rigged-that is, having her sails brought to yards hung horizontally by the middle. Supposed to be an abbreviation of brigantine. BRIGGS, HENRY, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 16th and 17th centuries. He was born near Halifax, in Yorkshire, 1556. He died in 1630, aged 74. He wrote to Archbishop Usher in 1615 that he was wholly taken up and employed about the noble invention of logarithms, which had come out the year before, and in the improvement of which he had so great a share. Briggs expounded the construction of logarithms in his

lectures at Gresham College. In these lectures he proposed the alteration of the scale from the hyperbolic form which Napier had given them, to that in which I should be the logarithm of the ratio of 10 to I; and soon after he wrote to Napier to make the same proposal to himself. In the year 1616 Briggs made a visit to Napier, at Edinburgh, to confer with him upon this change; and the next year he did the same also. In these conferences the alteration was agreed upon; and on Briggs's return from his second visit he pub. Logarithmorum chilias prima; i.e., the first chiliad, or 1000 of his logarithms.

In 1624 he pub. Arithmetica Logarithmica, containing the logarithms for 30,000 natural numbers to 14 places of figures, besides the index. "A stupendous work for so short a time."-Hutton.

In 1633 was pub. at Gonda, where the tables had been printed, under the care of Adrian Vlacq: Trigonometria Britannica, being a complete table of logarithmic sines and tangents for the 100th part of every degree to 14 places of figures, besides the index. BRIGGS'S LOGARITHMS.-The common or vulgar system of logarithms, constructed on the base of 10, is sometimes called Briggs's system, after their constructor Henry Briggs, a contemporary of Lord Napier. [LOGARITHMS.]

BRIGHTON FIRE INS. CO.--There was a Fire Ins. Co. under this name started in Brighton either late in the last or early in the present century. It had ceased to carry on bus. before 1824. We can learn no exact particulars concerning it.

BRIGHTON AND SUSSEX MUTUAL F. Asso.-This Asso. was founded at Brighton in 1850, to be carried on in connexion with a L. office bearing a similar title.

In 1854 the bus. was transferred to the Sun. Its duty return in 1853 was £630 os. 3d. The Rev. Robert Winter was Sec.

BRIGHTON AND SUSSEX MUTUAL PROVIDENT LIFE AND FRIENDLY SO., founded at Brighton in 1846, under the F. Sos. Acts. The So. appears to be making satisfactory progress. In 1851 its accumulated funds amounted to £9803; by 1861 they had reached £22,713, and in 1871 they stood at £36,812.

BRIGHT'S DISEASE (Albuminaria).-A diseased state of the kidney, occasioning the secretion of albuminous urine, and first described by Dr. Richard Bright. It is also called granular disease of the kidney, from the morbid condition presented by this organ.Hoblyn. [NEPHRIA.]

BRINTON, DR., M. D., pub. in 1856 a useful little book, On the Medical Selection of Lives for Assu. A 3rd ed. was pub. in 1861; a 4th in 1869, edited by Dr. Harley. We shall speak of this more at large under SELECTION, MEDICAL.

BRISTOL.-An English city, which several centuries since ranked in point of maritime importance second only to Lond. It is now endeavouring to regain its maritime renown.

The Phil. Trans. for 1753 contains the results of a summation of burials in Bristol from 1741 to 1750, compiled by Mr. Browning from the regis. of the 17 parishes, and the So. of Friends, Baptists, and Jews—including the whole of such parishes as extend beyond the city. The total number of burials in 10 years was 17,317, whence, by assuming the ann. deaths to average one-25th of the pop., Mr. Browning estimates the total pop. at 43,275. He comes nearly to the same conclusion by taking the number of houses rated to the land-tax (4866), adding one-fourth for omissions, and 1228 for the outparishes, and multiplying the total (7282) by 6-the supposed number of inhabitants in each house-which gave a pop. of 43,692.

In 1818 obs. were taken of the number of burials for the preceding 5 years, and a mort. T. was constructed therefrom. [BRISTOL MORT. TABLES.]

In 1861 the number of inhabited houses in the city was 23,590, and the pop. 154,093; in 1871, number of houses 27.547; pop. 182,524.

Few places have suffered more than Bristol from cholera. In 1832 1612 cases and 626 deaths were officially reported, but Dr. Symonds has adduced reasons for believing that the real number of deaths was little short of 1000. In 1849 there were 1979 deaths, and in 1854 there were 430. This great diminution was probably due to the alteration that had been made during the interval in the relation previously existing between sewage and drinking water, and may, perhaps, be fairly regarded as a proof of the value of general sanitary measures, as contrasted with special disinfection.

The city has more recently been changed from nearly the most unhealthy to be nearly the most healthy town in Gt. Brit. In Sept., 1865, it was returned as having the smallest mort. (19 p. 1000) in the U. K., the highest (that of Manchester) being 34. The ordinary death rate of Bristol, excluding epidemic cholera, was 28 p. 1000 before the execution of its sanitary works, and stood at 27 from 1862 to 1865, after the completion of these works. In 1865 it fell to 23 ̊5, in 1866 rose to 24'9, in 1867 fell again to 23, and in 1868 to 227. The pop. is estimated at 172,000, and a simple calculation shows that, without taking cholera into account, about a thousand lives are saved every year by the change in the rate of mort.-Dr. Budd's Paper before the Social Science Congress, 1869. According to Mr. Davies, the disease which now chiefly serves to keep up the Bristol death-rate is bronchitis. He attributes this, in some measure, to the loading of the air with smoke.

Very few ins. asso. have succeeded in making much money from their agencies or branches in this city.

BRISTOL BARGAIN.—Where A. lends B. £1000 on good security, and it is agreed that