This racial influence of lead is by no means generally recognised--even by Royal Commissioners. Its parallelism with the case of alcohol is striking. We may note, for instance, that paternal lead-poisoning, like paternal alcoholism, can cause degeneration in the offspring, if not indeed death before or shortly after birth. To quote Oliver again: “Taking seven healthy women who were married to lead workers, and in whom there was a total of thirty-two pregnancies, Lewin tells us that the results were as follows: eleven miscarriages, one still-birth, eight children died within the first year after birth, four in the second year, five in the third, and one subsequent to this, leaving only two children out of thirty-two pregnancies, as likely to live to manhood. In cases where women have a series of miscarriages so long as their husbands worked in lead, a change of industrial occupation on the part of the husbands restores to the wives normal child-bearing powers.” According to the statistical enquiry of Rennert, the malign influence of lead is exerted upon the next generation, ninety-four times out of one hundred when both parents have been working in lead, ninety-two times when the mother alone is affected, and sixty-three times when it is the father alone who has worked in lead. Here, then, as in the case of alcohol, the racial poison may act either through the father or through the mother, but especially through the mother. The importance of the demonstration as regards the father in the case of both poisons is that it means a poisoning of the paternal germ-cell. The facts may be commended to those extremists, so much more Weismannian than Weismann, who regard the germ-cells as existing in a universe of their own, wholly unrelated to the rest of existence. Another extremely interesting parallel between these two racial poisons may be noted. It is found, according to Professor Oliver, that “while following a healthy occupation these women, after having frequently miscarried when working in lead factories, would have two or three living healthy children, but circumstances necessitating the return of these women to town, and resumption of work in the lead factory, they in each successive pregnancy again miscarried.” He then quotes the following most remarkable case: “Mrs. K., aged thirty-four, had four children before going into the factory and two children after. She then had six miscarriages in succession, when she came under my care in the Royal Infirmary, having become the victim of plumbism and having lost the power in her arms and legs. She made a slow but good recovery and did not return to the lead works. In her next pregnancy she went to full term and gave birth to a living child.”