counted, through reduced fertility due to alcohol, as well as through death due to alcohol. But it should not be thought that his results are typical, and that all chronic alcoholists become sterile: every reader will know of cases in his own experience, where drunkards have large families; and the experimental work with smaller animals also shows that long-continued inebriety is compatible with great fecundity. It is probable that extreme inebriety reduces fertility, but a lesser amount increases it in the cases of many men by reducing the prudence which leads to limited families.
In 1910 appeared the investigation of Miss Ethel M. Elderton and Karl Pearson on school children in Edinburgh and Manchester.10 Their aim was to take a population under the same environmental conditions, and with no discoverable initial differentiation, and inquire whether the temperate and intemperate sections had children differing widely in physique and mentality. Handling their material with the most refined statistical methods, and in an elaborate way, they reached the conclusion that parental alcoholism does not markedly affect the physique or mentality of the offspring as children. Whether results might differ in later life, their material did not show. Their conclusions were as follows:
"(1) There is a higher death-rate among the offspring of alcoholic than among the offspring of sober parents. This appears to be more marked in the case of the mother than in the case of the father, and since it is sensibly higher in the case of the mother who has drinking bouts [periodical sprees] than of the mother who habitually drinks, it would appear to be due very considerably to accidents and gross carelessness and possibly in a minor degree to toxic effect on the offspring.
"Owing to the greater fertility of alcoholic parents, the net family of the sober is hardly larger than the net family of the alcoholic. [It should be remembered that the study did not include childless couples.]
"(2)