No longer content with a long perspective historical view, we will scrutinize the direct investigations of the problem which have been made 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 (for of course no one will deny that children of drunkards are frequently defective) is due solely to social and economic causes, or other causes in the environment: that the drunken parents, for instance, do not take adequate care of their children, and that this lack of care leads to the defects of the children. The latter influence is doubtless one that is nearly always at work, but it is wholly outside the scope of the present inquiry, and we shall therefore ignore it, save as it may appear incidentally. Nor does it require emphasis here; for the disastrous social and economic effects of alcoholism are patent to every observer. We find it most convenient to concentrate our attention first on the second of the questions above enumerated: to ask whether there is any good evidence that the use of alcoholic beverages by men and women really does originate degeneracy in their offspring.