The "London Assurance" for the same period had no clients who lived over ninety, and the "Equitable" had only one at ninety-six.
In an English Tontine there was in 1693 a person who died at one hundred; and in Perth there lived a nominee at one hundred and twenty-two and another at one hundred and seven.

On the other hand, a writer in the Strand Magazine points out that an insurance investigator some years ago gathered a list of 225 centenarians of almost every social rank and many nationalities, but the majority of them Britons or Russians.
In reviewing Walford's statistics we must remember that it has only been in recent years that the middle and lower classes of people have taken insurance on their lives.

Formerly only the wealthy and those exposed to early demise were in the habit of insuring.
Dr.Ogle of the English Registrar-General's Department gives tables of expectancy that show that 82 males and 225 females out of 1,000,000 are alive at one hundred years.

The figures are based on the death-rates of the years 1871-80.
The researches of Hardy in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries are said to indicate that three-score-and-ten was considered old age; yet many old tombstones and monuments contain inscriptions recording age far beyond this, and even the pages of ordinary biographies disprove the alleged results of Hardy's research.
In all statistical work of an individual type the histories of the lower classes are almost excluded; in the olden times only the lives and movements of the most prominent are thought worthy of record.

The reliable parish register is too often monopolized by the gentry, inferior births not being thought worth recording.
Many eminent scientists say that the natural term of the life of an animal is five times the period needed for its development.