32 BUSINESS OF LIFE INSURANCE

in the same sum at the beginning of each year. At the end of the year the funds on hand were divided among the beneficiaries of the members who had died during the year. With many changes of plan and adjustments of rates and benefits, this company survived until 1866, in which year it passed out of existence by reinsuring all of its outstanding risks in a solvent company. It had long before eschewed the assessment plan, however, and was operating on the level premium plan, but the effects of its long continuance on an unsound plan had been unfavourable to its success.

In 1722 charters were granted to two insurance companies, the Royal Exchange and Lon-don Assurance, to be organised upon a stock basis and to transact all forms of insurance, including the insurance of lives. But these companies, which, by the bye, are yet flourishing, undertook nothing but short term insurance at very high rates.

About the middle of the eighteenth century the idea of founding a new company on the mutual plan to supply insurance for the whole period of life at level rates of premium, fixed by the age at entry, was brought forward by Thomas Simpson, whom the Encyclopedia Brittanica calls "the greatest non-academical mathematician that England has ever produced," and James Dodson, formerly a professor of mathe-