Eight hundred people tried their luck. "Many non-expert competed," Galton wrote later in the scientific journal Nature, "like those clerks and others who have no expert knowledge of horses, but who bet on races, guided by newspapers, friends, and their own fancies." The analogy to a democracy; in which people of radically different abilities and interests each get one vote, had suggested itself to Galton immediately "The average competitor was probably as well fitted for making a just estimate of the dressed weight of the ox, as an average voter is of judging the merits of most political issues on which he votes," he wrote.