Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/492

476 the management of another Life Assurance Society was made to me, which I declined. That office is still in existence.

The information and experience I had thus gained led me to think that the public were not sufficiently informed respecting the nature of assurances on lives, and that a small popular work on the subject might be useful. I prepared such a work as intervals of leisure admitted, and early in 1826 published it under the title of "A Comparative View of the various Institutions for the Assurance of lives." This little volume was soon translated into German, and became the groundwork upon which the Great Life Assurance Society of Gotha was founded. Every year since that event I have received a copy of the report of the state of the Institution—a gratifying attention which I am happy to have this opportunity of acknowledging.

The wish expressed by my translator, in his Preface, has also been fulfilled by the establishment of many other excellent Life Assurance Offices, founded on similar principles.

In Germany alone there were, in 1860, twenty-four Life Assurance Companies, in which about 260,000 persons were assured to the amount of upwards of forty millions sterling. The oldest and most successful of these institutions have adopted my Table of the Equitable experience, and I am informed that it agrees very well with the results of their own experience up to about the fifty-seventh year. After this the deaths are rather more frequent than those of the Equitable.

Another still more gratifying result arose. My father, whose acquaintance with mercantile affairs was very