Mr. Sprague, in his report on Mr. Finlaison's Tables of Mortality among Government Life Annuitants, states as the result of his study of the subject of graduation that the most satisfactory system of adjustment is the graphic method; and he supports this opinion by referring to the irregularities which he regards as a consequence of the use of Mr. Woolhouse's method of adjustment. I do not doubt that Mr. Sprague would conceive and correctly draw a curve to satisfy all the conditions of good graduation; but in my own hands the graphic method would be a failure, and there may be others who doubt if they have skill to draw the curve and patience to amend it by the successive trials which Mr. Sprague himself finds necessary.

I have lately examined the Blue Book on the Health of the Navy for the year 1878, in order to ascertain whether the information contained in it could be utilized for life insurance purposes. I thought that it might perhaps assist the Actuary in fixing the rate of extra premium to be charged for sea risk; but the general conclusion at which I have arrived is, that while the information contained in the Blue Book is extremely valuable for the purpose of estimating the healthiness or unhealthiness of different naval stations, and the special risks that have to be guarded against in each, and for other kindred purposes, yet the information is of very little value (if any) to insurance companies. It may, nevertheless, be useful to lay before the readers of the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries a few of the figures contained in the book.

Amongst the various descriptions of securities, whether requiring for their absolute safety the insurance of a life or lives or not, it is well known by those who are called upon to advise lenders with regard to them, that none require more anxious care and caution than dealings involving expectancies, reversions and postobits. A long course of judicial decisions makes it manifest that our Courts are averse from giving any facilities for enabling persons entitled to such interests to obtain money on them; and until the Legislature interfered to modify the doctrine so often enunciated by the judges, so far at least as sales of reversions are concerned, the purchase of expectant titles was rendered almost impossible. But even the Act to which we allude protects the purchaser only in a modified degree, for instead of relegating his position to that of ordinary purchasers of other kinds of property, it enacts merely that a sale, otherwise bona fide, and without fraud or unfair dealing, is not to be set aside on the ground of undervalue alone. We have intimated that this enactment applies only to sales of reversions. This is the received opinion in the legal profession, although it is quite arguable, from the scope of the interpretation clause in the Statute, that it might be held to apply equally to advances on reversionary interests.