Taav Laitinen of Helsingfors secured information from the parents of 2,125 babies, who agreed to weigh their infants once a month for the first eight months after birth, and who also furnished information about their own drinking habits. His conclusion is that the average weight of the abstainer's child is greater at birth, that these children develop more rapidly during the first eight months than do the children of the moderate drinker, and that the latter exceed in the same way the children of the heavier drinker. But a careful analysis of his work by Karl Pearson, whose great ability in handling statistics has thrown light on many dark places in the alcohol problem, shows[21] that Professor Laitinen's statistical methods were so faulty that no weight can be attached to his conclusions. Furthermore, he appears to have mixed various social classes and races together without distinction; and he has made no distinction between parents, one of whom drank, and parents, both of whom drank. Yet, this distinction, as we have pointed out, is a critical one for such inquiries. Professor Laitinen's paper, according to one believer in racial poisons, "surpasses in magnitude and precision all the many studies of this subject which have proved the relation between drink and degeneracy." As a fact, it proves nothing of the sort as to race degeneracy. Again, T. A. MacNicholl reported on 55,000 American school children, from 20,147 of whom he secured information about the parents' attitude to alcoholic drinks. He found an extraordinarily large proportion (58%) of deficient and backward children in the group. But the mere bulk of his work, probably, has given it far more prestige than it deserves; for his methods are careless, his classifications vague, his information inadequate; he seems to have dealt with a degenerate section of the population, which does not offer suitable material for testing the question at issue; and he states that many of the children drank and smoked,--hence, any defects found in them may be due to their own intemperance, rather than that of their parents. In short, Dr. MacNicholl's data offer no help in an attempt to decide whether alcoholism is an inheritable effect.