Even the social insects (bees and ants) at times indulge in fruit ferments. The claim, therefore, that alcohol is the product of high civilisation, hence of recent origin, and hence peculiarly destructive, is untenable. That excess in alcohol frequently occurs in degenerate stocks is, however, undeniable. But as Krafft-Ebing, Kiernan, Spitzka and others have shown, intolerance of alcohol is an expression of degeneracy. The person intolerant of alcohol becomes either a total abstainer because of a personal idiosyncrasy (like that which forbids certain people to eat shell-fish lest nettle-rash occur), or because of parsimony, or for both reasons combined. Such total abstainers leave degenerate offspring in which degeneracy assumes the type of excess in alcohol as well as even lower phases. The race tests of the deteriorating influence of alcohol are practically valueless, nor are statistics concerning alcoholism in the ancestry of degenerates of much more use. The enormous amount of idiocy, for example, in the Scandinavian countries, charged by Huss, Langdon Down and others to alcoholism in the parents, has been, by the most recent researches, cut down by Roof to less than 7 per cent. Insane hospital statistics vary to a like degree. Bad faith, however, is out of the question in these statistics. Lack of analytic skill, and that dangerous unscientific, canting, philanthropic tendency which rebels at statistics unfavourable to preconceived sociologic theories, explain these discrepancies. The ignoring of all but the alcoholic factor produces also great elements of error. Kiernan[153] cites twenty-three cases in which degenerate stocks were charged to alcoholic parentage, but which on analysis proved to be due to a degenerative factor in the parents of which alcoholism was merely an expression. Nearly all the offspring born after inebriety were prematurely born, defective, epileptic, hysteric, insane, idiots or criminals. Some few were healthy, apart from their intolerance of alcohol. In eighteen cases both father and mother were alcoholists. The fathers in four of these cases had been temperate, industrious, and affectionate ere being sunstruck. Following this came periods of irritability, excessive drinking and spendthriftiness. The mothers had remained for some years after the fathers' breakdown free from the use of alcohol, but were nervously exhausted from the strain. One became depressed during pregnancy, was given gin for the depression, and the habit persisted after the delivery. In the three other cases painful menses developed during the nervous exhaustion. The popular prescription for these, gin, was given, with the result of producing inebriety. In ten cases skull injury to the father had like results on both mother and father. In two cases the mother became a victim of painful menstruation after a railroad accident; gin drinking, to relieve this, followed and became a habit. The father's nervous system broke down under the strain