The “grounds of theory,” or rather, our elementary physiological knowledge of the nutrition of the germ-plasm by the blood of its host, are in reality precisely the grounds which would lead us to expect those consequences of parental alcoholism which in fact we find. =Alcoholism as a symptom of degeneracy.=--We have seen that alcohol may be a cause of degeneracy: we now have to recognize the converse relation. For an authoritative and radical discussion of the problem, the reader may be referred to the second Norman Kerr Memorial Lecture, delivered by Dr. Welsh Branthwaite, H.M. Inspector under the Inebriates' Act, in 1907.[65] He speaks as “the only man in close touch with all inebriates under legal detention in England.” He reaches most important conclusions which are generally accepted, as the discussion shows. He says, “the more I see of habitual drunkards, the more I am convinced that the real condition we have to study, the trouble we have to fight, and the source of all the mischief, is ... defect[66] in mental mechanism, generally congenital, sometimes more or less acquired.... In the absence of alcohol, the same persons, instead of meriting the term inebriate would have proved unreliable in many ways; they would have been called ne'er-do-weels, profligates, persons of lax morality, excitably or abnormally passionate individuals, persons of melancholic tendency or eccentric.... It seems to me exceedingly doubtful whether habitual inebriety ... is ever really acquired in the strictest sense of the word--_i.e._ in the absence of some measure of pre-existing defect.” Having studied 2,277 inebriates, committed under the Inebriates Acts, up to December 31st, 1906, Dr. Branthwaite _finds 62.6 per cent. of these mentally defective_. The remainder he regards as of average mental capacity, using, however, an exceedingly low standard of what that capacity is. He concludes that in a large majority of police-court cases, “mental disease was the condition for which they were repeatedly imprisoned--mental disease merely masked by alcoholic indulgence.... The majority of our insane inebriates have become alcoholic because of their tendency to insanity.... Certain peculiarities in cranial conformation, general physique, and conduct, have long been recognised as evidences of congenital defect. Nearly all the 1,375 cases included in the two defective sections of our table have given evidence of possessing some of these characteristic peculiarities, and _it is morally certain that the large majority of them started life handicapped by imperfect brain development_.”[67] The lecture is accompanied with many photographs clearly showing the physical marks of congenital defect, and Dr. Branthwaite remarks that “even the untrained eye should meet with no difficulty in recognising ‘something wrong’ with all of them.”