From the mortality tables the death rate per thousand of persons at each age is determined, as is also the average duration or expectation of life at each age.

The American experience tables of mortality, for instance, can tell you a good deal more about your chances of life at a given age than you can hope to get from the astrologist, palmist, and others of the cult. Dropping the decimal portion of these tables, the foregoing abstract will show your chances of dying from any or all causes as compared with 100 other persons of your age who may be in health to invite insurance risks. As a key to the reading, take the 10 group at 40 years old, and, looking across to the end of the forty year period, it will be seen that eighty one of the original 100 will be dead.

Having established the deaths in this proportion from the first year of the policy's issue to the age of 96, at which age it is assumed that the last man out of a given 100,000 starting at the age of 10 will die, the insurance company is ready to negotiate with you at any of these ages on the basis of a fixed annual premium for any kind of policy which you may choose to take. There are four of these policy forms in general use. The simplest and cheapest of these is the term insurance policy -usually for five or ten years-in which fixed terms the payments in those years provide for the payment of the death claim, should death occur within the period specified in the policy.

The ordinary life policy ranks second in the amount of premium to be paid annually until death at whatever age. On this form of policy premiums are payable during the whole period of life.

The limited payment policy practically is the ordinary life policy, only that an equivalent of the premiums which would be paid during the ordinary term of life, according to the mortality tables, are paid within a specified time.

After these the endowment policy, for ten or twenty year periods, offers the insured the return of the face value of his policy if at the end of ten or twenty years he shall be living to claim it. This is the form of policy which is comparable in its benefits with the savings bank's interest at 3 per cent compounded semiannually.