SUMMARY.Life tables for the imago of Musca vicina and Calliphora erythrocephala were compiled from flies kept under controlled conditions. Musca were fed on diluted milk and Calliphora on 10% sugar solution and chicken liver.In Musca females are slightly longer lived than males and the contrary is true for Calliphora.The survivorship curves, and more strikingly the death eurves, exhibit a relatively high mortality during the early days of imaginal life. For the purpose of graduation, the life tables were broken up into two portions and the first one, containing the period of “premature imaginal mortality,” fitted by a fifth order parabola, and the second one by the Gompertz‐Makeham formula.For Musca, a complete life table, covering all stages of development, has been compiled and compared to the human life table including miscarriages. This comparison reveals a parallelism between portions of the survivorship curves representing respectively the periods of foetus—egg, infancy—larva, youth and puberty—pupa and young imago, adult man—