Abstract
A recent paper in Advances in Applied Probability (Siegel (1976)) considered the duration of the time Tmn for a linear birth and death process to grow from a (large) initial size m to a larger size n. The main aim was to show that, when the birth rate exceeds the death rate, Tmn is close to its mean value, log n/m, with high probability. This paper establishes this result using much simpler techniques.