"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behaviour,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on; an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!" {126} One phase of the question of hereditary tendencies to inebriety is extremely interesting from a physiological and sociological point of view. As the result of carefully gathered statistics, there seems to be no doubt now that when children are conceived while the parents, or either of them, is in a state of drunkenness, the offspring is very likely to be of low-grade physical constitution and often of very neurotic tendencies. In France, particularly in the case of a number of insane children and idiots, histories of this nature have been obtained in confirmation of this unfortunate factor as an element in degeneracy. In general it may be said that about one-third of the admissions to homes for children of low intelligence, as well as to insane asylums, are due to this cause. There is in this, of course, an added motive for temperance, and it would seem that parents should be warned of the danger to which they are subjecting their offspring by excessive indulgence in alcohol, when it may be followed by such serious and lasting results to the beings on whom their love and affection will be expended in the future. This phase of alcoholic excess has never been taught as insistently as its importance would demand, perhaps because of the delicacy of the subjects which it involves; but it is too significant a factor in making or marring progress in the development of the race to allow any pusillanimous motives to prevent the spread of precious knowledge. [Footnote 3]