=Alcohol and heredity.=--According to Dr. Archdall Reid, “alcohol, year after year, eliminates from the race a great number of people so constituted that intoxication affords them keen delight, leaving the perpetuation of the race in great measure to those on whom intoxication confers little or no delight.... Now since alcohol weeds out enormous numbers of people of a particular type, it is a stringent agent of selection--an agent of selection more stringent than any one disease.” The factor that really makes the drunkard “is certainly inborn, and therefore as certainly transmissible to offspring. The man who has it is cursed with the ‘alcohol diathesis,’ with the ‘predisposition to drunkenness.’ Thus most savages are keenly capable of enjoying drink, and their offspring inherit the capacity.” Féré has shown that “it is one of the characteristics of the degenerate that they are prone to have recourse to the poisons, like alcohol and morphia, which hasten their decadence and elimination.” Thus, as Dr. W. C. Sullivan points out, alcohol “might certainly be adjudged a salutary evil if its incidence were limited to individuals whose extreme inferiority of organisation renders them wholly undesirable and useless to the community. _But this is very far from being the case._”[56] The whole crux of the question lies in this last sentence. Alcohol certainly destroys many degenerate stocks, and that is good, though it would be better to do what we shall do some day--hasten and ameliorate the process by forbidding parenthood to the degenerate. _But does alcohol also make degenerates; does it even make more degenerates than it destroys?_ A somewhat similar difficulty arises in the case of infant mortality. The causes of infant mortality destroy many children inherently unfit, diseased or weakly. But we are not justified in keeping up our infant mortality, if we find, as we do, that for every diseased child whom they destroy they kill many who were healthy at birth and damage for life many more. A man is born sober--in most cases, but not always,[57] as we shall see--and any changes produced in his body by alcohol are “acquired.” Therefore, rejecting Lamarck, are we to reject the doctrine that the effects produced by alcohol on parents are transmitted to offspring?