The progress towards a system of Assurance, as will be seen, is so far slow. We have got from the gaming tables by way of the Great Plague to Bills of Mortality. But still there is hardly a glimmer of science. The Bills of Mortality themselves suffered from a grievous defect from the point of view of insurance. They included a statement of the cause of death, and even of the particular disease from which the patients died, if--and it is a considerable “if”--the disease were amongst those known to the medical faculty. But they did not give ages. And without ages the probabilities of the duration of life were still mere guesswork. Life insurance, as we understand it, is based upon a scientific computation in which the ages of the insured are the first consideration. During that Century, however, three men appeared, to whose efforts the real science of insurance owes its chief debt. The first of these men--one John Graunt, the son of a tradesman, who had migrated from Lancaster and settled in Birchin Lane--enjoyed no more of the opportunities of education than the sons of other tradesmen. He left an unknown school early for the counter of his father, shared in the public work of his Ward, and became a Major in the train bands; but some spark in the man set his thoughts upon the laws of life so far as the Bills of Mortality helped to their elucidation. He seems to have been impressed, and even annoyed, by the extraordinary carelessness with which men reckoned the population of London. It was spoken of in millions. One grave writer, indeed, went so far as calmly to assert that there were two million less people living in London in one particular year than in the year which had preceded it; and he made this astounding statement as though it were a matter which anyone might expect. John Graunt published in 1662 his “National and Political Reflections on the Bills of Mortality.” The work made a great stir, and did not, by the way, increase its author’s popularity, for he accounted the population of London at 384,000, and this calculation, which was very near the truth, did not find favour in the eyes of those swelling signors who only condescended to think in millions. The book, however, within the year, passed into a second edition. It set men thinking, and it impressed one, whom, most of all, so dry a subject would have been likely to repel--no less a person than His Majesty Charles himself. Charles the Second recommended John Graunt to the Royal Society, and charged the Fellows in round terms “That if they found any more such tradesmen they should admit them all.” The book found its way across the Channel, and in consequence Louis XIV. ordered a register of births and deaths to be kept in France, of a character much more strict than was observed in any other country of Europe.