A First Study of the Influence of Parental Alcoholism on the Physique and Intelligence of Offspring. By Ethel M. Elderton and Karl Pearson. Eugenics Laboratory Memoir Series X. Harald Westergaard, who reëxamined the Elderton-Pearson data, concludes that considerable importance is to be attached to the selective action of alcohol, the weaklings in the alcoholic families having been weeded out early in life.

Prohibition would have some indirect eugenic effects, which will be discussed in Chapter XVIII.

Chapter XXX, verses 31-43. A knowledge of the pedigree of Laban's cattle would undoubtedly explain where the stripes came from. It is interesting to note how this idea persists: a correspondent has recently sent an account of seven striped lambs born after their mothers had seen a striped skunk. The actual explanation is doubtless that suggested by Heller in the Journal of Heredity, VI, 480 (October, 1915), that a stripe is part of the ancestral coat pattern of the sheep, and appears from time to time because of reversion.

Such a skin affection, known as icthyosis, xerosis or xeroderma, is usually due to heredity. Davenport says it "is especially apt to be found in families in which consanguineous marriages occur and this fact, together with the pedigrees [which he studied], suggests that it is due to the absence of some factor that controls the process of cornification of the skin. On this hypothesis a normal person who belongs to an affected family may marry into a normal family with impunity, but cousin marriages are to be avoided." See Davenport, C. B., Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, p. 134. New York, 1911.