I Shall not try in this paper to give a complete picture of the actuary in Canada, nor of the Canadian life insurance business. I have neither the space nor qualifications to attempt such a task.

I shall, however, try to bring out the differences in these fields which would be most noticeable to a United Kingdom trained actuary coming to live and work in Canada. I have, I think, advantages in attempting to do this. I have not been in Canada for so long that I have forgotten the contrasts which struck me most forcibly, but on the other hand, after almost six years, I can hope to be a reasonably accurate guide and in some cases at least suggest an explanation for the differences.

The present is a particularly appropriate time to embark on a comparison of the demographic situation in the United States of America and that in England and Wales. P. K. Whelpton's study, Cohort Fertility: Native White Women in the United States, and the Report on the Family Census of 1946 conducted under the auspices of the Royal Commission on Population, have recently been published. These two works, one American and the other British, deserve careful study. This paper is designed mainly to make a broad comparison of the populations of the two countries and to provide a background for readers of Whelpton's book and of the Family Census Report.

The author wishes to acknowledge the ready assistance he received, on all occasions, from officials of the U.S. National Office of Vital Statistics and of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

A tool that is missing from the standard equipment of the actuarial student is the technique of maximizing, or minimizing, a function of several variables which are subject to certain constraints. The conception of an extreme value of a function, subject to constraints, is, we feel, as important as the mathematical technique of evaluating such a value in a particular instance.

We shall first deal with the technique and its mathematical development and then demonstrate some applications. It is as if we were demonstrating a new car, how it works and how to drive it. The first example is simple and is in the nature of a trial run to show how the car handles. Succeeding examples go further and we hope that the actuarial countryside into which we go will prove as interesting as the mechanical means of getting there. To many the vehicle itself will be familiar, but perhaps some of our byroads may lead to unfamiliar places or to familiar places by unfamiliar routes.

It is hoped that this article, which must be anonymous, will convey to students the nature of practical problems which had to be faced in dealing with one particular trust fund. In order that the transaction may not be readily identifiable, figures and dates have been altered, but not so as to affect the story materially.

In dealing with reversionary interests, the attention of the student is usually confined to the type of interest derived under personalty trusts, and he may not always be aware of the interesting problems that can arise in dealing with trusts to which the Settled Land Acts apply. Accordingly, in this article, it is proposed to describe some of the interesting points which lay behind one particular purchase of a reversionary interest in Settled Land.