Where children show a hereditary inclination toward drink, unquestionably one of the strongest factors is the inheritance of the same disposition, the same unstable nervous constitution and its accompanying lack of self-control which led the parent to drink, rather than the inheritance of the effects of the drink on the parent. For in many cases a parent may not become a drunkard until after the children who also become drunkards are born. That the tendency to drink immoderately is frequently due to a strain of feeble-mindedness or epilepsy becomes more evident every day. In many of the so-called "periodical" drunkards, the accompanying features of their periodic attacks of drink-craving, such as clouding of memory, restlessness and depression, are those commonly associated with ordinary epileptic attacks. =Probably Over Fifty Per Cent. of Inebriety in Man Due to Defective Nervous Constitution.--=Branthwaite, an English authority on drunkenness, finds that about sixty-three per cent. of the inebriates who come to his notice are mentally defective. In alcoholic insanities heredity is a potent factor. It is coming to be realized more and more that pronounced alcoholism is due in a large percentage of cases, perhaps over half, to a defective nervous make-up. While it is true that many drunkards would not develop without free access to alcohol, on the other hand many would never develop without a bad heredity back of them, which gives them a peculiar nervous constitution that renders alcohol an undue stimulus. In a recent report of the New York State Hospital Commission it is stated that in fifty-four per cent. of the cases of alcoholic insanity, a family history of insanity, epilepsy or nervous disease exists. Thus in the presence of alcohol most of these unfortunates are helpless pawns of a hereditary weakness. So when the question of alcoholism is viewed from all angles, the children of the human drunkard would seem to run a double menace of misfortune, since they may be subject both to the direct poisoning effects of alcohol and the results of an inheritable degeneracy.