be the case ordinarily, such was not the view with which a citizen of London, by name John Graunt, thought they should be regarded. This man was the author of the first English work on the subject, entitled “Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality.” Little is known of his antecedents, save that he was the son of one Henry Graunt of Lancaster, that he was born in “Birching Lane,” and that he had the ordinary education granted to the sons of tradesmen. He came early into business, passed through the chief offices of his ward with reputation, and became captain and major of the train-bands, when such an office involved danger as well as honour. All that has hitherto been said of Graunt might be said of many. But Graunt’s genius was far from being confined within these limits. It shone through all the disadvantages of mean birth and doubtful breeding. It broke down the barriers of rank and the limits of position, and gave him the first thought of a design, which was the earliest movement in economical arithmetic, and the closest approximation to the data on which life assurance is founded. The exact time is not known when he began to collect and to consider the Bills of Mortality; but he says his thoughts had been turned that way for several years, before he had any design of recording certain notions he had formed. Until he published his volume, a more than Egyptian darkness was on the eyes of the people, and he had to combat some very singular notions. Among others, that London was to be reckoned by millions, that the proportion of women to men was three to one, and that in twenty-six years the population had increased two millions. “Men of great experience in this city talk seldom under millions of people to be in London.” To grapple with these and similar errors was Graunt’s object; and it is easy to comprehend, that his readers rebelled against assertions which lowered the pretensions of their favourite city. It is probable that he made some enemies by his book; as when the fire of London occurred, he was accused of having gone to the reservoir of the New River Company, and of cutting off the supply of water. As, however, he had changed, or was on the point of changing his creed from puritanism to papistry, and the papists had the credit of originating the fire; the accusation was possibly a party one, and is of little importance now. It is with his work on the population we have to deal, and this, which contained “a new and accurate thesis of policy, built on a more certain reasoning than had yet been adopted,” was first published in 1664; meeting with such an extraordinary reception that another edition was called for in the following year, the book being spoken of wherever books then made their way. It formed a taste for these studies among thinking men; and the fact is greatly to the author’s credit, that he made a bold, if fruitless, attempt to deduce the law of life from bills of mortality