Item 76 - Letter from John William Lubbock

4 pp.

JWL will be happy to be of assistance to WW's friend Jones [Richard Jones] in making the calculations of which WW speaks: 'I wish very much to see tables such as that in your letter instead of those vague appearances which are given by writers on population. I have not been able to find any attempt to put into mathematical formulas the relations which exist between the elements of the population. I have endeavoured to explain some of them which depend more immediately upon the law of mortality as the proportion of the living at each age, the ratio of the deaths to the whole population etc'. JWL gives the calculation for the probability of a person living n years ['On the Calculation of Annuities, and on Some Questions in the Theory of Chances', Trans. of the Camb. Phil. Soc., 1830].