Desirable as the Wasserman test may be, it requires special laboratory facilities and equipment as well as a specially trained examiner to make it a reliable test. Moreover it can not be given by the general practitioner for the very moderate fee that must obtain in a pre-nuptial examination compelled by law. If it or the serum test for gonorrhea are to be applied then the legislative body of the state will find it necessary to establish a special public laboratory or laboratories for their application. This, however, is not a matter of particular difficulty and would be capital well invested in any state. =The Perils of Venereal Disease Must Be Prevented at Any Cost.--=However, no matter what the cost may be to the state, no matter what the exaction from the individual, the grave perils of venereal disease to society _must_ be prevented. We owe it to the cause of humanity that there be fewer victims born into a world of eternal night, that from a parentage of polluted blood there spring no longer hosts of children with feeble misshapen bodies or with tarnished intellects, death-marked at the door of life. =Bad Environment Can Wreck Good Germ-Plasm.--=In conclusion it is evident from our discussion of prenatal influences that not all of being well-born is concerned with heredity in its proper sense, since the unborn young may be influenced either directly or indirectly by environmental conditions which are in no sense products of heredity, although as far as the immediate child is concerned the result may be quite as disastrous where the influence is a baneful one. As to the production of beneficial prenatal effects, while parents can do nothing toward modifying favorably such qualities as are predetermined in their germ-plasm, nevertheless they must come to realize that bad environment can wreck good germ-plasm. They can see to it that they keep themselves in good physical condition by wholesome temperate living, and thereby insure as far as possible healthy germ-cells for the conception and good nutrition for the sustenance of their progeny. Their one sacred obligation to the immortal germ-plasm of which they are the trustees is to see that they hand it on with its maximal possibilities undimmed by innutrition, poisons or vice. CHAPTER VII RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONDUCT Since both physical and mental attributes are unquestionably inherited, it becomes a matter of importance to inquire into the nature of the entity we call personality. To what extent is human conduct a product of parentage? Although apparently free agents are we in reality only by infinitely subtle indirections making the responses, forming the habits, establishing the characters which result merely from the blind impulsions of an inherent constitution? If so, who is praiseworthy, who blameworthy? Are men "But helpless pieces of the Game He plays Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days."