One unfortunate tendency of the new companies is to give life assurance a speculative character, when nothing is less speculative in reality. Yet the extraneous temptations and collateral advantages promised by most are very mischievous. Men now sometimes insure their lives with a vague belief that in a few years they will have no more premium to pay; they quarrel with the fair divisions of old offices, and taunt their managers with the advantages to be derived from the new. As an example of the language that is sometimes indulged in, one modern office promises to set apart a portion of its future profits, whether such should amount to thousands or to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands or to millions, for the support and future provision of any person in decay who shall have once, for however brief a space of time, held a single share in such company. “To become a shareholder,” says the prospectus, “is as it were to effect at once and for ever a policy of assurance against want.” The reader is left to judge for himself of this singular specimen of assurance. But, independently of the expenses which eat up the premiums, it may be feared that in an anxious search after business, the examining physician may not be so rigid in his report as those of the older established companies; the lives admitted by the directors, therefore, not being so good as they should be for the ultimate safety of the office. It has been added, in support of this, that in some of these companies the mortality has been 40 per cent. more than it should have been, had proper care been taken. But are we not very ignorant of the laws which govern disease? It is well known by physicians that the chances of life in individuals are constantly changing. Mr. Gompertz, the father of our actuaries, has expressed a belief that it would be difficult to pick out 10 per cent. of really uninsurable lives from the entire population. Those which are now doubtful, or even diseased, to-morrow become sound and insurable; while those accepted with gladness at the ordinary rates of to-day, become in almost the same proportion ailing and uninsurable afterwards. The chances of individual health, be it sound or unsound, are as uncertain as those of individual life, and no effort having hitherto been made, excepting by Mr. Neison, to discover the law which governs disease in its relation to life, it follows that any argument against the new companies based on the low character of the lives which they assure, may prove, however specious in theory, very unsound in practice. And the mode adopted by the old offices of conducting their business has certainly, up to the present time, been too much in their own favour. By well-grounded tables they establish the fact that out of 1000 lives, taken at random among the diseased as well as the healthy, a certain number will die each year, until all are extinct. But though on this they found their