ess,
three of convulsions in the first month, two were feeble-minded, one
was a dwarf, one was an epileptic, seven were normal. In a family in
which both father and mother and their ancestors were drunkards there
were six children: three died of convulsions within six months, one
was an idiot, one a dwarf, and one an epileptic. For comparison there
were taken from the same station in life ten families in which there
was no drunkenness: three children died from general weakness, three
from intestinal troubles, two of nervous affection, two were
feeble-minded, two were malformed, fifty were normal. Legrain has
studied on a larger scale the descendants of two hundred and fifteen
families of drunkards in which there were eight hundred and nineteen
children. One hundred and forty-five of these were insane, sixty-two
were criminals, and one hundred and ninety-seven drunkards. Of course
all this cannot be attributed to alcohol alone. There is first to be
considered a probable variation in the nervous system which is
expressed in the alcoholic habit; second, the environment consisting
in poverty, bad associates, etc., which the alcoholic habit brings;
third, the alcohol alone. That defective inheritance so frequently
takes the form of alcoholism is largely due to the environment. There
has never been the opportunity to study on a large scale the effect of
the complete deprivation of alcohol from a people living in the
environment of modern civilization. There is a possibility, and even
probability, that the defective nervous organization which predisposes
to alcoholism would seek satisfaction in the use of some other
sedative drug. So complex are all the interrelations of the social
system that it would be possible to regard alcohol as an agent useful
in removing the defective, were it not for its long-enduring action
and its effects on the descendants, procreation not being affected by
its use.

Diseases of the nervous system are particularly apt to affect the
offspring, and often the inherited condition repeats that of the
parents. This is due to the fact that most of the nervous diseases
depend both upon intrinsic factors which consist in some defective
condition of the nervous system representing a variation, and
extrinsic factors due to environment or occupation which make the
basal condition operative. The definite relation between alcoholism
and insanity is due to alcohol acting not as an intrinsic but an
extrinsic fac