during recent years. These investigations have in many cases been widely advertised to the public, and their conclusions have been so much repeated that they are often taken at their face value, without critical examination.
It must be borne in mind that the solution of the problem depends on finding evidence of degeneracy or impairment in the offspring of persons who have used alcohol, and that this relation might be explainable in one or more of three ways:
(1) It may be that alcoholism is merely a symptom of a degenerate stock. In this case the children will be defective, not because their parents drank, but because their parents were defective—the parents' drinking being merely one of the symptoms of their defect.
(2) It may be that alcohol directly poisons the germ-plasm, in such a way that parents of sound stock, who drink alcoholic beverages, will have defective offspring.
(3) It may be that the degeneracy observed in the children of drunkards