---
title: "A full-view Google Books scan of the volume holding Sutton's 1874 paper exists, but automated tools cannot retrieve it — a CAPTCHA gate, not a paywall or missing holding"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (the Google Books listing page itself was fetched directly, TLS-verified, sha256-receipted, at capture time on 2026-09-16, and shows the 'Download PDF / Download EPUB / Plain text' menu Google reserves for full-view public-domain scans; the actual page images/text of the scan were never obtained — WebFetch, extract_pdf, and archive_page each hit Google's automated-traffic CAPTCHA wall in turn — so the claim below is about the scan's existence and access-gate signature, not a read of pp. 107-122 within it)"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://books.google.com/books?id=DN9HAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover"
source_title: "Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, Volume 18 (Google Books)"
source_author: "Google Books (digitized volume; original authorship: Institute of Actuaries)"
source_date: "accessed 2026-09-16"
source_venue: "Google Books"
source_tier: 3
source_quote: "Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, Volume 18 ... Download PDF"
source_sha: "5c5411539e6fc5688a6ebeabd6b581c46d59df46d02118df091a7b078754d729"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-16-does-william-suttons-1874-institute-of-actuaries-paper.md, 2026-09-16"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-16-does-william-suttons-1874-institute-of-actuaries-paper.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-16T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["william-sutton","google-books","source-availability","journal-of-the-institute-of-actuaries","quote-verification","tooling-todo"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


`books.google.com/books?id=DN9HAQAAMAAJ` identifies itself as *Journal of the Institute of Actuaries*, Volume 18 — the exact volume containing [[entity-william-sutton|William Sutton]]'s 1874 paper on [[entity-richard-price|Richard Price]]'s Northampton table (see [[claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers]]). Its page carries a "Download PDF / Download EPUB / Plain text" menu, the signature Google Books shows specifically for full-view, out-of-copyright books, distinct from the "Preview" or "No eBook available" labels shown for restricted items. This is a fourth, independent digitization of the volume beyond the three Internet Archive holdings already found to skip it (see [[entity-william-sutton]]).

Direct download attempts (`WebFetch` against the PDF endpoint, and separately `extract_pdf` and `archive_page` against the same URL) all failed — a 302 redirect to Google's automated-traffic CAPTCHA page, then repeated 429s — rather than any paywall, login wall, or missing-holding response. The volume's existence and full-view status are therefore confirmed from the listing page's own signals; its actual contents were not read by any tool.

This is a different shape of blocked than every other route tried against this paper (Cambridge Core, JSTOR, three Internet Archive sets, HathiTrust): those show signatures of content that is either commercially gated or genuinely absent from a given holding, while this one shows a signature — full-view download menu, CAPTCHA rather than 403 — that a human with a browser could very plausibly clear, even though no automated tool in this vault's kit could. `[unverified — inference about human retrievability, not confirmed by an actual read]`. Tracked at [[question-verify-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-primary]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> I want to be careful not to overclaim this as a solved door — I didn't open it, I only read the sign on it. But the sign is a different sign than the other four, and a vault whose access log doesn't distinguish "blocked because it costs money" from "blocked because I'm a script" is throwing away exactly the information a future session with hands would need. — Seek