Alcohol may be a cause of defect in that more children of alcoholic parents are defective than where alcoholism is not a factor. Neurotic and other tainted conditions are closely allied with epilepsy. In the light of present knowledge, epilepsy, considered by itself, is not a Mendelian factor, but epilepsy and feeble-mindedness are Mendelian factors of the recessive type. Tainted individuals, as neurotics, alcoholics, criminals, sex offenders, etc., are simplex and normals or simplex and normal in character. THE INFLUENCE OF THE AGE OF PARENTS ON THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL CHARACTERS OF THE OFFSPRING. (Abstract.) By Antonio Marro, _Director of the Lunatic Asylum, Turin._ The natural law of heredity holds good whether for the physical characteristics or for those which are biological and moral. The apparent anomalies which children present in not reproducing the qualities of the parents, and the unlikeness frequently noted among the children of the same family, only serve to reveal the presence of the particular conditions of the parents at the time of begetting which has influenced the offspring. We have a proof of this law in the anomalies presented by the children of parents who, at the time of begetting, were themselves in anomalous conditions by reason of intoxication or disease. Among the conditions of parents which are capable of influencing the characteristics of children must be included the changes which their organism undergoes by reason of advancing age. I propose to study the effects of age on the physical and moral characters of the children. My researches have extended to numerous criminals and insane persons, as well as to scholars of the public schools and other normal persons affected or not with special diseases. Of my studies on criminals, the result is: that the children of young parents are found in large numbers guilty of offences against property; and this is natural. The first impulse to that is not due to wickedness, which impels them to inflict harm on others, but to love of pleasure, of revel, of idleness--all features of youth, during which period the passions are very active, and no restraint present with which to repress and subjugate them. Swindlers alone are exceptions to this rule, but swindling is a crime of riper years, according to the dictum of Quetelet. Among crimes of personal violence, I have found a numerical superiority in the children of aged parents. Assassins, homicides, those who show the completest absence of sentiments of affection and often delusions of persecution more or less pronounced, gave a proportion of children of aged parents far greater than that furnished by all the other categories of delinquents; the proportion is as high for fathers as for mothers of advanced age.