The Pleasures of Ignorance Part 2

On the 1st of March, for instance, being St David's Day, there will be a banquet at which Mr Lloyd George will make a reference to hills, mists, G.o.d, and a country called Wales. On the 28th of March, being Easter Monday, there will be a Bank Holiday. On the 24th of May, being Empire Day, the majority of shops in Regent Street will hang out Union Jacks, and school children will salute the flag at Abinger Hammer, Communists in various parts of London gnas.h.i.+ng their teeth the while.

On the 15th of June the anniversary of Magna Charta will fall and will pa.s.s without any disturbance. On the 12th of July Orangemen will dress im in sashes and listen to orators whose speeches will prove the hollowness of the old adage that you cannot serve both G.o.d and Mammon.

On the same day, Lord Birkenhead will celebrate his forty-ninth birthday, showing that Gallopers are born not made. Need I continue, however? The year is obviously going to be a crowded one. It will, as I have said, contain 365 days and will come to an end at 12 P.M. on St Silvester's Day at the time of the new moon.

I have said enough, I think, to prove that one knows a great deal more about the future than is generally realised. There may be sceptics who doubt the virtue of my prophecies. If there be such, all I ask is that they should mark them well and verify each of them as its fulfilment falls due. The expense will be small. The most serious item will be the journey to Aberdeen to see the tide coming in on the 24th of January; but, by taking up a collection in Aberdeen, it should be possible to reduce one's net outlay by the better part of a s.h.i.+lling.

On the whole, there never were prophecies easier to verify. I confidently challenge comparison between them and any prophecy made by any Cabinet Minister during the last five years. I even challenge comparison with the much more respectable prophecies contained in _Raphael's Prophetic Messenger_. Raphael at times strains our credulity. When he tells us, for instance, that on the 27th of April it is going to be "cold and frosty" and that on the 29th of April we shall see "high winds, storms and thunder," we feel that he is giving a free rein to his imagination and treating prophecy not as a science but as an art. That the 30th of April will be "showery" I agree, but how does he know that there will be "high wind and lightning" on the 21st of December? I am also somewhat puzzled as to the means by which he arrives at the conclusions set forth in his "every-day" guide for each day in the year. I can myself prophesy what you will do on each day, but I cannot, as he does, prophesy what you ought to do. This introduces an ethical element which is beyond my scope or horoscope.

We need not quarrel with him when he dismisses the 1st of January as "an unimportant day," but when he bids us on the 2nd of January "court, marry, and deal with females," we may reasonably ask: "Why?"

His advice for the 3rd is more acceptable. "Be careful," he says, "until 1 P.M. then seek work and push thy business." That is about the time of day one prefers to begin to "seek work"; would there were more days in the calendar like the 3rd of January. Some saint must have it in his keeping. On the 7th, however, it will be safer to abstain from work altogether. Raphael says: "A very unfortunate P.M. and evening for most purposes. Court and deal with females." Sunday, the 9th, is better. "Ask favours," he says, "in the P.M., and court." Though January is less than half gone, I confess I am getting a little breathless with so much courting. Raphael probably recognises this, and a note of caution creeps into his advice on the 13th, on which he bids us "court and marry in the morning, then be careful." By the 18th, however, he is his old self again. "Court," he says cheerfully, "marry and ask favours and push ahead." Then come one rather careful day and two unfortunate ones, till on the 22nd, in a burst of exuberance, he offers us the day of our lives. "Deal with others," he exhorts us, "and push thy business, seek work, travel, court, marry, buy and speculate." I doubt if all this can be crowded into twenty-four hours outside _The Arabian Nights_. Besides, as a result of following Raphael's advice, we are already bigamists several times over, and have become sick of the sight of a Registry Office. By the end of the month even Raphael shows signs of being a little weary of his scarcely veiled incitements to Bluebeardism. For the 29th he advises: "Avoid females and be very careful," and for the 30th, which is a Sunday: "Avoid females and superiors." I should just about think so.

We need not follow Raphael through the rest of the year. It is enough to say that he keeps us busy courting, marrying, seeking work, being careful, travelling, speculating, pus.h.i.+ng ahead, and avoiding females right down till the end of December. He occasionally varies his formula, as when on the 6th of April he bids us: "Do not quarrel. Be quiet," and when, on the 23rd of June, he advises: "Ask favours of females, and travel." On the whole however, his recommendations leave us with a sense of the desperate monotony of human existence. It is no wonder the novelists find it so difficult to invent an original plot.

Nothing seems to happen--even in the future--except the same old thing. It is all as monotonous as North, South, East and West. We turn with relief to the page on which Raphael tells us what are the best days on which to hire maidservants and to set turkeys. Our interest redoubles when we come on his advice to those about to kill pigs. "Do this," he says, "between eight and ten in the morning, and between the first quarter and full of the Moon; the pigs will weigh more, and the flavour of the pork be improved." Then there are "Legal and Commercial Notes," one of which--"A bailiff must not break into a house, but he may enter by the chimney "--suggests a subject for a drawing by Mr George Morrow. The medical notes are equally worthy of consideration.

On one page we are given a list of herbal remedies, and we are told how one disease can be cured by pouring boiling water on hay (upland hay being better than meadow hay) and applying it to the stomach. But Raphael is no crank, as we see in his suggestion for the treatment of influenza:

"If you think you have got an attack of influenza slip off to bed at once and take the whisky or brandy bottle with you, and don't be afraid of it, for alcohol is the best medicine you can take as it kills the germs in the blood. Do not wait until you are half dead--remember that a st.i.tch in time saves nine, even with health."

Even on the subject of the care of children's teeth he makes it clear that, whoever may have come under the blight of p.u.s.s.yfoot, it is not he:

"I believe a Committee is to be appointed to inquire into the failing eyesight and decaying teeth in children. I think I have already stated that these troubles were due to the excessive amount of sugar or sweetstuffs consumed. All sweet things cause an excessive exudation of saliva from the gums, which affect and impair both the teeth and the eyesight for, despite of what dentist and doctor may say, there is an intimate relation between the two. Dr Sims Wallace, the eminent lecturer on Dental Surgery, recommends _Beer_ or dry _Champagne_ as an excellent mouth wash. They are also pleasant to the throat and stomach!"

The reader is now in a position to estimate for himself the extent to which he can rely on Raphael's judgment, and to decide how far he will accept the horoscope Raphael has cast for Mr Lloyd George. On this he writes:

"This gentleman has figured so prominently in our national affairs for the last few years, that it may not be out of place if I give a few remarks on his horoscope. The time of his birth is stated to have been January 17th, 1863, 8h.

55m. A.M., but neither myself, nor other Astrologers, are satisfied with this hour. I think he was born some minutes sooner. At his birth the Sun was in exact Square to Jupiter, and also in Square to Mars, and Mars was in Opposition to Jupiter. These are very ominous and important aspects. The former denotes great extravagance, and waste of money, and the latter gives impetuosity, and danger to the person."

He then proceeds to give a "brief a.n.a.lysis" of Mr Lloyd George's horoscope:

"The Sun near Ascendant--self-praise, egotism, self-satisfaction, fondness for publicity and notoriety.

"Venus and Mercury on Ascendant--fluency in speech, agreeableness, desire to please, fondness for Music, Arts, and Sciences.

"Mars in 2nd, in Opposition to Jupiter, unfavourable for financial undertakings, extravagance, carelessness, and losses in speculation.

"Ura.n.u.s in 4th, trouble at end of life.

"Jupiter in the 8th, benefit or help from marriage partner.

"Moon near cusp of the 11th, many friends, especially females.

"The Aspects denote--Sun Square Jupiter and Mars, recklessness in expenditure, public disapprobation, and an unfavourable and sudden ending to life.

"Venus in Trine to Saturn, and Moon in s.e.xtile to Jupiter--domestic relations of the happiest description, and the wife a great help."

I frankly doubt if any man can foretell the future of Mr Lloyd George.

No one knows what he will say or do to-morrow. We know what phrases he will use, but we do not know on what side he will use them, or what he will mean by them. All we know is that Sir William Sutherland will say ditto.

Let us, then, return to safer fields of prophecy. What, really, is going to happen in 1921? I think I know. Human beings will behave like bewildered sheep. They will be chiefly notable for their lack of moral courage. Good men will apologise for the deeds of bad men, and bad men will do very much as they please. Cruel and selfish faces will be seen in every railway carriage and in every omnibus, but readers of the respectable Press will refuse to believe that there are any cruel people outside Germany and Russia. Not one but all the Ten Commandments will be broken, and turkeys will be eaten on Christmas Day. Men will die of disease, violence, famine and old age, and others will be born to take their place. Intellectuals will be pretentious--mules solemnly trying to look like Derby winners. There will be a considerable amount of lying, injustice, and self-righteousness. Dogs will be fairly decent, but some of them will bite. Above all, the human conscience will survive. It will survive.

It will continue to be the old still, small voice we know--as still and as small as it is possible to be without disappearing into silence and nothingness. And some of us will get a certain amus.e.m.e.nt out of it all, and will prefer life rather than death. We shall also go on puzzling ourselves as to what under the sun it all means. Not even a murderer will be without a friend or a pet dog or cat or bird. That is what 1921 will be like. That, at least, is as certain as the time of the high tide at Aberdeen on the 24th of January.

VIII

ON KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE

It was only the other day that I came upon a full-grown man reading with something like rapture a little book--_s.h.i.+ps and Seafaring Shown to Children_. His rapture was modified however, by the bitter reflection that he had already pa.s.sed so great a part of his life without knowing the difference between a s.h.i.+p and a barque; and, as for sloops, yawls, cutters, ketches, and brigantines, they were simply the Russian alphabet to him. I sympathise with his regret. It was a n.o.ble day in one's childhood when one had learned the names of sailing-vessels, and, walking to the point of the harbour beyond the bathing-boxes, could correct the ignorance of a friend: "That's not a s.h.i.+p. That's a brig." To the boy from an inland town every vessel that sails is a s.h.i.+p. He feels he is being shown a new and bewildering world when he is told that the only s.h.i.+p that has the right to be called a s.h.i.+p is a vessel with three masts (at least), all of them square-rigged. When once he has learned his lesson, he finds an unaccustomed delight in wandering along the dirtiest coal-quay, and recognising the barques by the fact that only two of their three masts are square-rigged, and the brigs by the fact that they are square-rigged throughout--a sort of two-masted s.h.i.+ps. Vessels have suddenly become as real to him in their differences as the different sorts of common birds. As for his feelings on the day on which he can tell for certain the upper fore topsail from the upper fore top-gallant sail, and either of these from the fore skysail, the crossjack, or the mizzen-royal, they are those of a man who has mastered a language and discovers himself, to his surprise, talking it fluently. The world of s.h.i.+pping has become articulate poetry to him instead of a monotonous abracadabra.

It is as though we can know nothing of a thing until we know its name.

Can we be said to know what a pigeon is unless we know that it is a pigeon? We may have seen it again and again, with its bottle-shoulders and s.h.i.+ning neck, sitting on the edge of a chimney-pot, and noted it as a bird with a full bosom and swift wings. But if we are not able to name it except vaguely as a "bird," we seem to be separated from it by an immense distance of ignorance. Learn that it is a pigeon however, and immediately it rushes towards us across the distance, like something seen through a telescope. No doubt to the pigeon-fancier this would seem but the first lisping of knowledge, and he would not think much of our acquaintance with pigeons if we could not tell a carrier from a pouter. That is the charm of knowledge--it is merely a door into another sort of ignorance. There are always new differences to be discovered, new names to be learned, new individualities to be known, new cla.s.sifications to be made. The world is so full of a number of things that no man with a grain of either poetry or the scientific spirit in him has any right to be bored, though he lived for a thousand years. Terror or tragedy may overwhelm him, but boredom never. The infinity of things forbids it. I once heard of a tipsy young artist who, on his way home on a beautiful night, had his attention called by a maudlin friend to the stars, where they twinkled like a million larks. He raised his eyes to the heavens, then shook his head. "There are too many of them," he complained wearily. It should be remembered, however, that he was drunk, and that he did not know astronomy. There could be too many stars only if they were all turned out on the same pattern, and made the same pattern on the sky.

Fortunately, the universe is the creation not of a manufacturer but of an artist.

There is scarcely a subject that does not contain sufficient Asias of differences to keep an explorer happy for a lifetime. It would be easy to do nothing but chase b.u.t.terflies all one's days. It is said that thirteen thousand species of b.u.t.terflies have been already discovered, and it is suggested that there may be nearly twice as many that have so far escaped the naturalists. After so monstrous a figure, we are not surprised to learn that there are sixty-eight species of b.u.t.terflies in Great Britain and Ireland. We should be astonished, however, had we not already expended our astonishment on the larger number. How many of us are there who could name even half-a-dozen varieties? We all know the tortoisesh.e.l.l and the white and the blue--the little blue b.u.t.terflies that flutter over the gold and red of the cornfields. But the average man does not even know by name such varieties as the Camberwell Beauty, the Dingy Skipper, the Pearl-bordered Fritillary, and the White-letter Hairstreak. As for the moth, are there not as many sorts of moths as there are words in a dictionary? Many men give all the pleasant hours of their lives to learning how to know the difference between one of them and another.

One used to see these moth-hunters on windless nights in a Hampstead lane pursuing their quarry fantastically with nets in the light of the lamps. In pursuing moths, they pursue knowledge. This, they feel, is life at its most exciting, its most intense. They regard a man who does not know and is not interested in the difference between one moth and another as a man not yet thoroughly awakened from his pre-natal sleep. And, indeed, one could not conceive a more appalling sort of blank idiocy than the condition of a man who could not tell one thing from another in any department of life whatever. We would rather change lives with a jelly-fish than with such a man. This luxury of variety was not meant to be ignored. We throw ourselves into it with exhilaration as a swimmer plunges into the sea. There are few forms of happiness I know which are more enviable than that of those who have eyes for birds and flowers. How they rejoice on learning that, according to one theory, there are a hundred and three different species of brambles to be found in these islands! They would not have them fewer by a single one. It is extraordinarily pleasant even for one who is mainly ignorant of the flowers and their families to come on two or three varieties of one flower in the course of a country walk. As a boy, he is excited by the difference between the pin-headed and the thrum-headed primrose. As he grows older, he scans the roadside for little peeping things that to a lazy eye seem as like each other as two peas--the dove's foot geranium, the round-leaved geranium and the lesser wild geranium. "As like each other as two peas," we have said: but _are_ two peas like each other? Who knows whether the peas have not the same differences of feature among themselves that Englishmen have? Half the similarities we notice are only the results of our ignorance and idleness. The townsman pa.s.sing a field of sheep finds it difficult to believe that the shepherd can distinguish between one and another of them with as much certainty as if they were his children. And do not most of us think of foreigners as beings who are all turned out as if on a pattern, like sheep? The further removed the foreigners are from us in race the more they seem to us to be like each other. When we speak of negroes, we think of millions of people most of whom look exactly alike. We feel much the same about Chinamen and even Turks. Probably to a Chinaman all English children look exactly alike, and it may be that all Europeans seem to him to be as indistinguishable as sticks of barley-sugar. How many people think of Jews in this way! I have heard an Englishman expressing his wonder that Jewish parents should be able to pick out their own children in a crowd of Jewish boys and girls.

Thus our first generalisations spring from ignorance rather than from knowledge. They are true, so long as we know that they are not entirely true. As soon as we begin to accept them as absolute truths, they become lies. One of the perils of a great war is that it revives the pa.s.sionate faith of the common man in generalisations. He begins to think that all Germans are much the same, or that all Americans are much the same, or that all Conscientious Objectors are much the same.

In each case he imagines a lay figure rather than a human being. He may hate his lay figure or he may like it; but, if he is in search of truth, he had better throw the thing out of the window and try to think about a human being instead. I do not wish to deny the importance of generalisations. It is not possible to think or even to act without them. The generalisation that is founded on a knowledge of and a delight in the variety of things is the end of all science and poetry. Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in all things, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations.

They subject the uncla.s.sified and chaotic facts of life to the order of beauty. The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also in pursuit of a generalisation--the perfect generalisation of the universe. And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a series of generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough to call the known world? To know the resemblances of things is even more important than to know the differences of things. Indeed, if we are not interested in the former, our pleasure in the latter is a mere sc.r.a.p-book pleasure. If we are not interested in the latter, on the other hand, our sense of the former is apt to degenerate into guesswork and a.s.sertion and empty phrases. Shakespeare is greater than all the other poets because he, more than anybody else, knew how very like human beings are to each other and because he, more than anybody else, knew how very unlike human beings are to each other. He was master of the particular as well as of the universal. How much poorer the world would have been if he had not been so in regard not only to human beings but to the very flowers--if he had not been able to tell the difference between fennel and fumitory, between the violet and the gillyflower!

IX

THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING

Horse-racing--or, at least, betting--is one of the few crafts that are looked down on by practically everybody who does not take part in it.

"It's a mug's game," people say. Even betting men talk like this.

There is a street called Mug's Row in a north of England town: it is so called because the houses in it were built by a bookmaker. Whether it was the bookmaker or his victims that gave the street its name I do not know. To call a bookmaker a mug would seem to most people an abuse of language. Yet the only bookmaker I have ever really known used to confess himself a mug in the most penitent fas.h.i.+on. He was a mug, however, not because he could not make money, but because he could not keep it. The poor of his suburb, when in difficulties, he declared, used always to come to him instead of going to the clergy, and he was unable to refuse them. But then he was bitter against the clergy. As a young man, he had been a Sunday school teacher, and so far as I could gather, he might have gone on being a Sunday school teacher till the present day if he had not suddenly been a.s.sailed with doubts one Sabbath afternoon as he expounded the story of David and Goliath.

Whether it was that he looked on David as having taken an unsportsmanlike advantage of the giant or whether he doubted that so much could be done with such little stones, he did not make quite clear. Anyhow, from that day on, he never believed in revealed religion. He quarrelled with his clergyman. He broke the Sabbath. He began to drink beer and to go to race-meetings. He rapidly rose from the position of carpenter to that of bookmaker, and, were it not for his infernal gift of charity, he would probably now be driving his own car and be hall-marked with a Coalition t.i.tle. Even as it was, he was much more prosperous than any carpenter. Whenever he produced money, it was in pocketfuls and handfuls. Strange that a bookmaker, who by his trade must be accustomed to miracles, should find it difficult to believe in David and Goliath. He was possibly a man who betted on form, and on form Goliath should undoubtedly have won. David was an outsider. He had no breeding. He would have been surprised if he could have foreseen how his victory would rankle some thousands of years later in the soul of an honest English bookmaker.

It is, however, just these matters of form and breeding that raise horse-racing and betting above the intellectual level of a game of nap. Betting men who ignore these things are as unintellectual as the average novelist. There are some, for instance, who shut their eyes and bring down a pin or a pencil on a list of names of the horses, in the hope that in this way they may discover a winner. No doubt they may. It is perhaps as good a way as any other. But there is something trivial in such methods. This is mere gambling for the sake of excitement. There is no more fundamental brainwork in it than in a game I saw being played in a railway carriage the other day, when a man drew a handful of coins from his pocket and bet his friend half-a-sovereign that there would be more heads than tails lying uppermost. This is a game at which it is possible to lose five pounds in two minutes. It is the sort of game to which a betting man will resort when _in extremis_, but only then. The ruling pa.s.sion is strong, however. I have a friend who on one occasion went into retreat in a Catholic monastery. Two well-known bookmakers had also gone into temporary retreat for the good of their souls. My friend told me that even during the religious services the bookmakers used to bet as to which of the monks would stand up first at the conclusion of a prayer, and that in the solemn hush of the wors.h.i.+p he would suddenly hear a hoa.r.s.e whisper: "Two to one on Brownie"--a brother with hair of that colour--and the answer: "I take you, Joe." I have even heard of men betting as to which of two raindrops on a window-pane will reach the bottom first. It is possible to bet on cats, rats or flies. Calvinists do not bet, because they believe that everything that happens is a certainty. The extreme betting man is no Calvinist, however. He believes that most things are accidents, and the rest catastrophes.

Hence his philosophy is almost always that of Epicurus. To him every day is a new day, at the end of which it is his aim to be able to say, like Horace, _Vixi_, or, as the text ought perhaps to read, _Vici_.

The intellectual betting man, on the other hand, has a position somewhere between the extremes of Calvinism and Epicureanism. He wors.h.i.+ps neither certainty nor chance. He reckons up probabilities.

When Mr Asquith picked out Spion Kop as the winner of the Derby, he did so because he went about the business of selection not with a pin or a pencil, but with one of the best brains in England. In the course of his long conflicts with the House of Lords he had probably interested himself somewhat profoundly in questions of heredity and pedigree, and he was thus well equipped for an investigation into the records of the parentage and grandparentage of the various Derby horses. All that the ordinary casual better knows about Spion Kop is that he is the son of Spearmint, which won the Derby in 1906. This, however, would not alone make him an obviously better horse than Orpheus, whose sire, Orby, won the Derby in 1907. The student of breeding must be a feminist, who pays as much attention to the female as to the male line. It was by the study of the female line that the most cunning of the sporting journalists were able to eliminate Tetratema from the list of probable winners. Tetratema, as son of the Tetrarch, was excellently fathered for staying the mile-and-a-half course at Epsom. More than this, as a writer in _The Sportsman_ pointed out: "The Tetrarch himself is by Roi Herode, a fine stayer, and his maternal grand-dam was by Hagioscope, who rarely failed to transmit stamina." It is when we turn to Tetratema's mother, Scotch Gift--or is it his grandmother something else?--apparently, that we discover his hereditary vice. This mare our journalist exposed to scathing and searching criticism, and concluded that "there can be nothing unreasonable in the inference, based on the records of this family, that the chances are against a Derby winner having descended from the least distinguished of ... four sisters." Even so, however, the writer a few sentences later abjures Calvinism, and denies that there is anything certain in what he calls breeding problems. "It seemed," he writes, "wildly improbable at one time that Flying d.u.c.h.ess would produce a Derby winner, for I believe it is correct that two of Galopin's elder brothers ran in a bus, and there were two others quite useless So, on the face of it, the chances were against Galopin, the youngest brother." I quote these pa.s.sages as evidence of the immense demand the serious pursuit of horse-racing puts on the intellect. The betting man must be as well versed in precedents as a lawyer and in genealogical trees as a historian. At school, I always found the genealogical trees the most difficult and bewildering part of history.

Yet the genealogical tree of a king is a simple matter compared to that of a horse. All you have to learn about a king is the names of his relations: regarding a horse, however, you must know not only the names but the character, staying power and domestic virtues of every male and female with whom he is connected during several generations.

If a man spent as much labour in disentangling the cousins.h.i.+p of the royal families of ancient Egypt, he would be venerated as a scholar in five continents. Oxford and Cambridge would shower degrees on him. Sir William Sutherland would get him a place on the Civil List. Hence it seems to me that tipping the winners is not, as is too often regarded, "anybody's job": it is work that should be undertaken only by men of powerful mind. No man should be allowed to qualify as a tipster unless he has taken a degree at one of the Universities. The ideal tipster would at once be a great historian a great antiquary, a great zoologist, a great mathematician, and a man of profound common-sense.

It is no accident that an ex-Prime Minister was one of the few Englishmen to spot the winner of the Derby of 1920. Mr Asquith must have gone patiently through all Spion Kop's relations, weighing up the chances whether it was an accident or owing to the weather that such an one fifteen years ago was beaten by a neck in a six-furlong race, studying incidents in every one of their careers, seeing that none of them had ever had a great-uncle a bus-horse, bringing out a table of logarithms to decide difficult points.... We need not be surprised that there are fewer great tipsters than great poets. Shakespeare alone has given us a portrait of the perfect tipster--"looking before and after ... in apprehension how like a G.o.d!"

It is perhaps, however, when we leave questions of breeding and come to those of form, that we realise most fully the amazing intellectualism of the betting life. In the study of form we are faced by problems that can be solved only by the higher algebra. Thus, if Jehoshaphat, carrying 7 st., ran third to Jezebel, carrying 8 st. 4 lb., in a mile race, and Jezebel, carrying 8 st. 4 lb., was beaten by a neck by Woman and Wine, carrying 7 st. 9 lb., over a mile and a quarter, and Woman and Wine, carrying 8 st. 1 lb., was beaten by Tom Thumb, carrying 9 st. in a mile 120 yds., and Tom Thumb, carrying 9 st. 7 lb., was beaten by Jehoshaphat over seven furlongs, we have to calculate what chance Tom Thumb has of beating Jezebel in a race of a mile and a half on a wet day. There are men to whom such calculations may come easy. To Mr Asquith they are probably child's play. For myself, I shrink from them and, if I were a betting man, would no doubt in sheer desperation be driven back on the method of pin and pencil. But it is obvious that the sincere betting man has to make such calculations daily. Every morning the student of form finds his sporting page full of such lists as the following:--

0 0 0 CONCLUSIVE (7-5), Kroonstad-Conclusion. 8th of 9 to Poltava (gave 17lb.) Gatwick May (6f) and 7th of 19 to Orby's Pride (rec 4lb) Kempton May (5f).

3 3 3 RAPIERE (7-4), Sunder--Gourouli. Lost 3-4 length and 3 lengths to Bantry (gave 2lb) and Marcia (rec 7lb) Newmarket May (1m), GOLDEN GUINEA (gave 20lb) not in first 9. See BLACK JESS.