The Measurement of Mortality - Mortality Tables

The establishment of any plan of insuring against premature death requires some means of giving mathematical values to the chances of death, and the considerations advanced in the first division of this chapter show that the laws of probability can be used for this purpose as soon as trustworthy data are secured showing the course of past mortality. Mortality tables, as such data are called, are records of past mortality put into such form as can be used in estimating the course of future deaths.