Dipsomania is a form of impulsive degenerative insanity, and it is probably epileptic in origin. After a few days of insomnia and loss of appetite for food, there is an irresistible impulse to drink alcoholic liquor and to indulge in other excess. The patient drinks until all means of getting alcohol are exhausted. He will take crude alcohol, bay rum, cologne, the alcohol that is about pathologic specimens in a hospital museum. The attack lasts from one to two weeks, and is followed by depression and a feeling of remorse. The onsets are irregular in occurrence, and between them the patient may {111} be temperate or have even an extreme distaste for alcohol. This form of disease is not infrequent among professional men and clergymen, and it is impossible to find out just how far the patient is responsible for his condition. If bishops would investigate the alcoholic tendencies of the _families_ of candidates for seminaries, and reject all that have this taint, there would be much less scandal. It is a serious error of judgment to ordain a seminarian that has even once been under the influence of alcohol, and those seminarians that cover up the tippling of a companion, because he is a good fellow, are guilty of far-reaching crime. The fact is worth investigation whether or not a liquor dealer who never drinks alcohol, but who lives for years in the presence of volatilised alcohol, has much of the alcoholic degeneracy and a tendency to beget neurotic children. Certainly the fumes of wood alcohol have killed workmen that went down only once into a vat containing these fumes, and other alcohols in the form of vapour should have deleterious effects. Féré produced monsters in chickens by exposing eggs to the vapour of alcohol. In judging a drunkard, it must be remembered that in many forms of alcoholism, after the condition is well established, the patient has little more freedom of will than a brute has. If he is accountable for the habit, he is blamable for the crime that follows. If he is not accountable, and it is often very difficult to prove that he is, he is to be treated as a blamelessly insane man. In proper surroundings, and with skilful direction, a child born with a tendency, or more exactly a temptation, to dipsomania or other alcoholic neurosis can be saved, but commonly the circumstances of such a child's life are the worst imaginable. These children must never take alcohol, even as a medicine, and they must not be pushed in school to nervous exhaustion. A tendency to unchastity can "run in families," like a disposition toward alcoholism, but the disgrace in yielding to this vicious bias keeps many such unfortunates clean. It is to be regretted that public opinion can not give the same aid in alcoholic predisposition.