The valuation of reversions, absolute and contingent, is a matter of great and growing importance. The greater part of the landed property in the United Kingdom being settled in strict entail, proposals are being constantly made by the expectant heirs for loans upon their reversionary estates; and so long as the present law and practice of settlement prevail, so long will the making advances on the security of reversionary interests in landed property continue to be an important part of the business of such Life Insurance Companies as are wise enough to cultivate it. Although the amount of the landed property in the country remains unaltered, yet the rentals are steadily increasing, and consequently the amount of the money which can be employed in the way above described may also be expected to increase. Again, the vast and rapid increase of wealth among the middle classes of the country has led to a great increase in the number of life interests and reversions under marriage settlements and wills; and in consequence of the many vicissitudes in trade, such reversionary interests in personal property are constantly offered for sale in increasing numbers. There is also, perhaps, a growing disposition, when the owners of reversionary interests in either real or personal estate become involved, to press their interests for public sale, instead of arranging privately a sale to some member of the family. On the other hand, as it is becoming better known how ready Offices of good standing are to make advances on contingent reversionary interests, applications are now made to them, which would formerly have been made to private money lenders, whose charges were, to say the least, excessive. From these combined causes, the number of reversions in the market is increasing, and seems likely to increase.

An Insurance Office, which, in consideration of fixed premiums undertakes the payment of a sum on the death of the assured, strictly speaking lays a wager with each of the assured, in which the stakes are proportional to the probabilities of the happening of the two contrary events—his living and his dying. Every assurance of a sum payable at death admits of being divided into partial assurances for a fixed period, as a year. Let the sum assured be S and the probability of death within a year p, then pS will be the stake of the assured, or the premium; and (1−p)S the stake of the office, i.e. the amount which the office would lose in case of the death of the assured within the year. The two stakes together therefore amount to the sum assured.

In the number of the Journal for April, 1868, Herr Wilhelm Lazarus, of Hamburg, reported the recent establishment in Berlin of a German Life Assurance Institute, a society having generally the same object as the Institute of Actuaries. As the proceedings of such an association cannot fail to interest the members of the Institute of Actuaries and the readers of its Journal, we purpose laying before them some of the more interesting papers read before the German Institute; and as a fit introduction to these we now give the following translation of the laws of that Society, for which we are indebted to Mr. J. Hill Williams.—ED. J. I. A.