CHAPTER II

made out, as racial poisons. Gonorrhea, malaria, arsenic, tobacco, and numerous other substances have been mentioned from time to time, and even ardently contended by propagandists to be racial poisons, but in the case of none of them, so far as we know, is there any evidence to support the claim. And as has been shown, in the case of the three chief so-called racial poisons, alcohol, syphilis and lead, the evidence is not great. We are thus in a position to state that, from the eugenists' point of view, the origination of degeneracy, by some direct action of the germ-plasm, is a contingency that hardly needs