“It was found that the injection of various solutions into ovaries of Raimannia was followed by the production of seeds bearing qualities not exhibited by the parent, wholly irreversible, and fully transmissible in successive generations. One of the seeds produced by a plant of _Œnothera biennis_ which had been treated with zinc sulphate differed so widely from the parental form that it could be distinguished from it by a novice. This new form has been tested to the third generation, and transmits all its characteristics fully.” =Alcohol a proved racial poison.=--But the reader will rightly desire some kind of experimental proof that alcohol itself can act as a cause of racial degeneration. We may first refer to the chapter on alcoholism and human degeneration in Dr. W. C. Sullivan's _Alcoholism, a Chapter in Social Pathology_,[61] for a recent _résumé_ of the subject. Without actually quoting Weismann, Dr. Sullivan begins by showing that, as we have seen, the doctrinal objection of Dr. Reid and others to the theory of alcoholic degeneration is quite irrelevant--“the effects attributed to parental alcoholism are not in the category of transmitted acquirements at all; they are the results, expressed in defect and deviation of development, of a deleterious influence exerted on the germ-cells, either directly through the alcohol circulating in the blood, or indirectly, through the deterioration of the parental organism in which these cells are lodged, and from which they draw their nutriment.” Later Dr. Sullivan points out that the racial effects of alcoholism in man are similar to those obtained by experimental intoxication in the lower animals. Combemale, for instance, found that pups begotten of a healthy bitch by an alcoholised dog were congenitally feeble and showed a marked degree of asymmetry of the brain. Recent experiments have shown the same thing as regards other poisons, and it is especially to be noted that in the experiments cited the mother was healthy. They prove that _paternal_ alcoholism alone (all questions of the nourishment of the growing child before birth, for instance, thus being excluded) can determine degeneration. Mr. Galton[62] himself long ago quoted the case “of a man who, after begetting several normal children, became a drunkard and had imbecile offspring”; and another case has been recorded “of a healthy woman who, when married to a drunken husband, had five sickly children, dying in infancy, but in subsequent union with a healthy man, bore normal and vigorous children.” Other intoxications show similar results though they are not _yet_ of grave racial importance. For instance, “a man who had had two healthy children acquired the cocaine habit, and while suffering from the symptoms of chronic poisoning engendered two idiots.” Brouardel and others have observed that the expectant mother who is a morphinomaniac may give birth to a child who shows all the phenomena of the morphia habit.