In an English Tontine
there was in 1693 a person who died at one hundred; and in Perth
there lived a nominee at one hundred and twenty-two and another
at one hundred and seven. On the other hand, a writer in the
Strand Magazine points out that an insurance investigator some
years ago gathered a list of 225 centenarians of almost every
social rank and many nationalities, but the majority of them
Britons or Russians.
In reviewing Walford's statistics we must remember that it has
only been in recent years that the middle and lower classes of
people have taken insurance on their lives. Formerly only the
wealthy and those exposed to early demise were in the habit of
insuring.
Dr. Ogle of the English Registrar-General's Department gives
tables of expectancy that show that 82 males and 225 females out
of 1,000,000 are alive at one hundred years. The figures are
based on the death-rates of the years 1871-80.
The researches of Hardy in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries are said to indicate that
three-score-and-ten was considered old age; yet many old
tombstones and monuments contain inscriptions recording age far
beyond this, and even the pages of ordinary biographies disprove
the alleged results of Hardy's research.
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