When our mutual life companies began their business in 1843, they had no American table of mortality to guide them in determining the premiums of insurance that ought to be charged at the different periods of life. There were no American statistics public or private, good, bad, or indifferent, to which they could refer, except the mortuary reports of cities, and these were so imperfect and unreliable as to be utterly useless, except to encourage the opinion that the chances of long life were about the same here as in the countries from which our people had emigrated. It was known that the numbers of the dying, as reported by our city registers, were below the real deaths; that the ages were full of errors; that the boundaries of the mortuary limits were constantly changing; that residents of the city were often buried in the country, and sometimes country people were interred in town; that the population was fluctuating; that the immigration from the rural districts and from foreign countries was large and irregular; that the census of the population, whether taken by the United States, or by the states, or by the cities themselves, was full of errors; that the ages of the living, both among males and females, were wrongly reported, sometimes intentionally, but always carelessly and thoughtlessly; and that these errors in the numbers and ages of the people and of the deaths were so numerous that no confidence could be placed in the ratio of the living and the dying at any particular age, while this ratio at all ages is an indispensable element in determining the proper premiums to be charged in any of the contracts made by our life companies.