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The intellectual betting man, on the other hand, has a position somewhere between the extremes of Calvinism and Epicureanism. He worships 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 Duchess 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 passages 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 cousinship 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 god!”