Another subject requires treatment here. It is the effect of alcohol on offspring. We are yet lacking in statistics giving the facts we need to know on this subject; but the general observation of competent persons who have had good opportunities to study it may teach us something. Alcohol, in its circulation in the blood, penetrates every part; not even the germ plasm escapes. Demme studied ten families of drinkers and ten families of temperate persons. The direct posterity of the ten families of drinkers included fifty-seven children. Of these, twenty-five died in the first weeks and months of their lives; six were idiots; in five a striking backwardness of their longitudinal growth was observed; five were affected with epilepsy, and five with inborn diseases. Thus, of the fifty-seven children of drinkers only ten, or 17.5 per cent., had normal constitutions and healthful growth. The ten sober families had sixty-one children, five only dying in the first weeks; four were affected with curable diseases of the nervous system; two only had inborn defects. The remaining fifty, 81.9 per cent., were normal in their constitutions and development. In this statement we have a graphic object lesson of the evil effects of alcohol on the germ plasm. Natural selection had far more to do in removing those unfit to survive in the intemperate than in the temperate families. A knowledge of the evil effects of alcohol on the unborn child was known to the ancients. The mother of Sampson was warned "not to drink any wine or strong drink nor to eat any unclean thing" because she was to conceive and bear a son who was to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines. Manoah was so interested in what the angel of the Lord had said to his wife that he sought an interview with him for further confirmation, and asked: "How shall we order the child, and how shall we do unto him?" evidently meaning, "How shall we train and educate him?" and the same advice was given as before. Whatever view the reader may hold as to the inspiration or non-inspiration of the Bible, certainly this advice was good. Other examples similar to it are to be found, not only in the same book, but in numerous historical works, and also abundant evidence in our own time of the evil effects of alcoholic drinks on unborn children giving them a tendency to insanity, idiocy and other nervous diseases. A whole book might be written on this branch of our subject.