Sunstroke produces the ordinary phenomena of nervous exhaustion, but the patient becomes more irritable, suspicious, and extremely proud. As these patients are not recognised for a long times as insane they often marry and produce degenerates. Kiernan reports a case in which father and mother (both of healthy stock) were overcome by the heat during one of the processions of the American Centenaries. The children born before the sunstroke were healthy, but there had been no children for five years previously. A year subsequent to the sunstroke (which was followed by a change in character in both parents) the woman had triplets, one of which died soon after birth from convulsions. The second of the triplets, a girl, became epileptic at 2, a prostitute at 16, and chronically insane at 20. The third triplet became a puberty lunatic at 16. Of three children subsequently born, two are epileptics and one is a moral imbecile who manifests premonitory evidences of paranoia. Sunstroke, however, underlies many cases of alcoholism. Not a few of the instances of degeneration charged to alcoholism are, in reality, due to the nervous condition arising from the exhaustion produced by sunstroke. To this factor was in no small degree due the extremely large infant mortality of the English in India of the first half of the present century. While temperature plays a part in producing degeneracy in the offspring through its production of systemic disorder in the ancestor, it is usually associated with other factors which aid or predispose to its effects. It also predisposes to the greater action of other causes. Very frequently the sun-struck person, rendered incapable of continued labour by irritability, becomes a tramp or a pauper, either of which conditions tends to accelerate the degenerative process and furthermore to increase the possible chances of passing down the effect through heredity by the ease with which illicit relationships are contracted. The least intelligent of the prostitute class, or rather, of that class of nymphomaniacs who have not fully entered upon a prostitute career, are driven into the workhouse or almshouse, where they often remain for years, or depart at intervals, leaving their offspring to be reared at public expense. The number of such children born yearly in almshouses is at least ten thousand in the United States.[175] An enormous proportion of these die in infancy but sufficient survive to form a potent source of degenerates. The influence of overheating further predisposes to the attack of microbes even in the temperate climates, and to constitutional defects resultant on these.