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 of the author’s life and writings, to which we refer the reader who desires fuller information. It may be mentioned here that Tetens also gave only a specimen table, apparently not imagining that persons using his work would find it extremely useful to have a series of commutation tables, calculated and printed ready for use.

The use of the commutation table was independently developed in England&mdash;apparently between the years 1788 and 1811&mdash;by George Barrett, of Petworth, Sussex, who was the son of a yeoman farmer, and was himself a village schoolmaster, and afterwards farm steward or bailiff. It has been usual to consider Barrett as the originator in England of the method of calculating the values of annuities by means of a commutation table, and this method is accordingly sometimes called Barrett’s method. (It is also called the commutation method and the columnar method.) Barrett’s method of calculating annuities was explained by him to Francis Baily in the year 1811, and was first made known to the world in a paper written by the latter and read before the Royal Society in 1812.

By what has been universally considered an unfortunate error of judgment, this paper was not recommended by the council of the Royal Society to be printed, but it was given by Baily as an appendix to the second issue (in 1813) of his work on life annuities and assurances. Barrett had calculated extensive tables, and with Baily’s aid attempted to get them published by subscription, but without success; and the only printed tables calculated according to his manner, besides the specimen tables given by Baily, are the tables contained in Babbage’s Comparative View of the various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives, 1826.

In the year 1825 Griffith Davies published his Tables of Life Contingencies, a work which contains, among others, two tables, which are confessedly derived from Baily’s explanation of Barrett’s tables.

ANNULAR, ANNULATE, &c. (Lat. annulus, a ring), ringed. “Annulate” is used in botany and zoology in connexion with certain plants, worms, &c. (see ), either marked with rings or composed of ring-like segments. The word “annulated” is also used in, heraldry and architecture. An annulated cross is one with the points ending in an “annulet” (an heraldic ring, supposed to be taken from a coat of mail), while the annulet in architecture is a small fillet round a column, which encircles the lower part of the Doric capital immediately above the neck or trachelium. The word “annulus” (for “ring”) is itself used technically in geometry, astronomy, &c., and the adjective “annular” corresponds. An annular space is that between an inner and outer ring. The annular finger is the ring finger. An annular eclipse is an eclipse of the sun in which the visible part of the latter completely encircles the dark body of the moon; for this to happen, the centres of the sun and moon, and the point on the earth where the observer is situated, must be collinear. Certain nebulae having the form of a ring are also called “annular.”

ANNUNCIATION, the announcement made by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary of the incarnation of Christ (Luke i, 26-38). The Feast of the Annunciation in the Christian Church is celebrated on the 25th of March. The first authentic allusions to it are in a canon, of the council of Toledo (656), and another of the council of Constantinople “in Trullo” (692), forbidding the celebration of all festivals in Lent, excepting the Lord’s day and the Feast of the Annunciation. An earlier origin has been claimed for it on the ground that it is mentioned in sermons of Athanasius and of Gregory Thaumaturgus, but both of these documents are now admitted to be spurious. A synod held at Worcester, England (1240), forbade all servile work on this feast day. See further.

ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE D’ (1863-  ), Italian novelist and poet, of Dalmatian extraction, was born at Pescara (Abruzzi) in 1863. The first years of his youth were spent in the freedom of the open fields; at sixteen he was sent to school in Tuscany. While still at school he published a small volume of verses called Primo Vere (1879), in which, side by side with some almost brutal imitations of Lorenzo Stecchetti, the then fashionable poet of Postuma, were some translations from the Latin, distinguished by such agile grace that Giuseppe Chiarini on reading them brought the unknown youth before the public in an enthusiastic article. The young poet then went to Rome, where he was received as one of their own by the Cronaca Bizantina group (see ). Here he published Canto Nuovo (1882), Terra Vergine (1882), L’ Intermezzo di Rime (1883), Il Libro delle Vergini (1884), and the greater part of the short stories that were afterwards collected under the general title of San Pantaleone (1886). In Canto Nuovo we have admirable poems full of pulsating youth and the promise of power, some descriptive