Demme has traced the appalling contrast between the offspring in ten sober families, and in ten families where one or both parents suffered from chronic alcoholism. Dr. Sullivan himself, realising the obviously greater importance of maternal alcoholism, since here we have the action of poisoned food--the maternal blood--upon the child before birth, made an enquiry of his own. He found that “... of 600 children born of 120 drunken mothers 335 (55.8 per cent.) died in infancy or were still-born, and that several of the survivors were mentally defective, and as many as 4.1 per cent. were epileptic. Many of these women had female relatives, sisters or daughters, of sober habits and married to sober husbands; on comparing the death-rate amongst the children of the sober mothers with that amongst the children of the drunken women of the same stock, the former was found to be 23.9 per cent., the latter 55.2 per cent., or nearly two and a half times as much. It was further observed that in the drunken families there was a progressive rise in the death-rate from the earlier to the later born children.” Dr. Sullivan cites as a typical alcoholic family one in which “the first three children were healthy, the fourth was of defective intelligence, the fifth was an epileptic idiot, the sixth was dead-born, and finally the productive career ended with an abortion.” Dr. Claye Shaw told the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, “we have inebriate mothers, and either abortions or degenerate children. The teleological[63] relationship between the two seems to be as certain as any other conditions of cause and effect.” The general rule is that any narcotic substance affects highly developed tissues sooner and more markedly than simpler tissues, and so it is in the case of alcohol and the infant. It is the developing nervous system that is most markedly affected. This leads, of course, to an increased child mortality, especially by way of convulsions. This was the cause of sixty per cent. of all the deaths that occurred amongst the six hundred children in Dr. Sullivan's series. But it has especially to be remembered that a large number of children whose nervous systems are injured for life by parental and more especially by maternal alcoholism do not die either as infants or children. Instead of dying of convulsions they live as epileptics. Of the children in Dr. Sullivan's series “219 lived beyond infancy, and of these 9, or 4.1 per cent., became epileptic, as compared with 0.1 per cent. of the whole population.” Other observers have found epilepsy in 12 per cent. and even 15 per cent. of the children of alcoholic parents. Of course these data, as such, do not demonstrate Dr. Sullivan's conclusion that “this action of alcoholism on the health and vitality of the stock is the most serious of the evils that intemperance brings on the community.”