The haphazard man, who is the antithesis of the professional speculator, will generally be found as differently constituted as are the results of his operations. The man who makes a study and business of speculating, investigating every detail that it seems necessary to probe until he has adapted it to the rest of his machinery, will be found to be a hard-grained man, sailing very close to the wind, while your persistently haphazard man is mostly a person of flabby character, and no less flabby mind, as easily frightened off a line that he has set himself to follow, in the innocence of a heart that expands with a delusive consciousness of possessing power, as a stray rabbit. Such a class of man is to be found by hundreds in the haunts of the Stock markets, and they are always fidgetting in and out, first as little bulls, and then as little bears, disappearing after a sharp panic like flies from a joint of meat that is rudely disturbed by the shop-boy, with the important difference that whereas the flies always get something, the speculators invariably drop their money. The following letter which appeared in the _Spectator_ of the 4th October, 1873, struck us as being _a propos_, as regards a portion of it, of this part of our subject. It affords another instance of the success which follows the trial of a haphazard speculator’s “scientific plan.” In playing against a public bank the gambler should know in these times that the science of mathematics has been already employed on the side of the managers, and is arrayed against him as a fixed law, working on the side of the _croupier_, whether he wills it or not:—