human
The Mercers' operations soon gave rise to more business-like companies, specially created to secure the public against some of the calamitous consequences of death. In 1706, the Amicable Life Assurance Office--usually, though, as the reader has seen, incorrectly, termed the First Life Insurance Office--was established in imitation of the Mercers' Office. Two years later, the Second Society of Assurance, for the support of widows and orphans, was opened in Dublin, which, like the Amicable, introduced numerous improvements upon Dr. Assheton's scheme, and was a Joint-Stock Life Assurance Society, identical in its principles with, and similar in most of its details to, the modern insurance companies, of which there were as many as one hundred and sixty in the year 1859.