Among the indirect advantages to be derived by the public from the establishment of Life Assurance Companies, may be fairly cited that of fostering a system of elaborate calculation so closely allied to the fiscal requirements of the times, that, allowing for hyperbole, the nation's finance minister might in the present day be in some degree characterized as the nation's actuary. Whether the incidental possession of analogous qualifications to those expected in insurance managers will ever be indirectly exacted by the general community from its finance ministers, would perhaps be presumptuous in us as actuaries to further discuss; but certain it is that, apart from insurance and its ramifications, no other definite school has hitherto been presented in which financial questions, and especially those relating to contingent finance, have ever been so elaborately and usefully developed. The interest and annuity tables alone, of insurance writers, form indeed an addition to financial literature of considerable importance.