There is already, as you will see, a glimmer of science, but still not much more than a glimmer. Sir William Petty was led on to some curious prophecies. For instance, the world would be fully peopled within the next 2,000 years, and the growth of London must stop of its own accord before the year 1800 was reached. The influence of these two men upon thought continued to grow, and in the year 1693, the most important year in the history of the science of insurance, Doctor Halley, the Astronomer Royal, published in a pamphlet a table of probabilities of the duration of human life at every age. He at last had something to go upon. He had discovered that the town of Breslau, in Silesia, had regularly issued Bills of Mortality in which the ages of the dead were recorded. He took the rate of mortality in that town during five successive years, and for the first time based the calculation of the duration of life upon a scientific foundation. CHAPTER VI. SOME ODDS AND ENDS. It is curious that, although the idea of insurance is utterly opposed to that of gambling--the one aiming at rapid gains, the other merely at protection from loss--still insurance took its origin from the doctrine of chance as observed at the gaming tables, and led to the discovery of quite a new form of gambling, which achieved an extraordinary vogue in the first half of the 18th Century. It was a period of fine clothes and callous natures; of high costs and lavish expenditure; of turbulent politics and grave risks. Such a period was the very soil in which gambling and speculation were sure to flourish. But, even so, the rapidity and the ingenuity with which the possibilities of gambling, by means of this new-fangled fashion of insurance, were recognised are quite remarkable. Indeed, during the greater part of this period, gambling in policies altogether superseded the legitimate business of insurance. The life of Sir Robert Walpole, whose person seemed at one time in peril from popular tumult, at another from party hatred, was always there to be insured, if less attractive propositions were not that morning to be discovered.