In visiting the mother in her present home and in talking with her over different phases of her past life, several things are evident; there has been no malice in her life nor voluntary reaction against social order, but simply a blind following of impulse which never rose to objective consciousness. Her life has utterly lacked coördination--there has been no reasoning from cause to effect, no learning of any lesson. She has never known shame; in a word, she has never struggled and never suffered. Her husband is a selfish, sullen, penurious person who gives his wife but little money, so that she often resorts to selling soap and other things among her neighbors to have something to spend. At times she works hard in the field as a farm hand, so that it cannot be wondered at that her house is neglected and her children unkempt. Her philosophy of life is the philosophy of the animal. There is no complaining, no irritation at the inequalities of fate. Sickness, pain, childbirth, death--she accepts them all with the same equanimity as she accepts the opportunity of putting a new dress and a gay ribbon on herself and children and going to a Sunday School picnic. There is no rising to the comprehension of the possibilities which life offers or of directing circumstances to a definite, higher end. She has a certain fondness for her children, but is incapable of real solicitude for them. She speaks of those who were placed in homes and is glad to see their pictures, and has a sense of their belonging to her, but it is faint, remote, and in no way bound up with her life. She is utterly helpless to protect her older daughters, now on the verge of womanhood, from the dangers that beset them, or to inculcate in them any ideas which would lead to self-control or to the directing of their lives in an orderly manner. The same lack is strikingly shown, if we turn our attention to the question of alcoholism in this family. We learn from a responsible member of the good branch of the family that the appetite for alcoholic stimulants has been strong in the past in this family and that several members in recent generations have been more or less addicted to its use. Only two have actually allowed it to get the better of them to the extent that they became incapacitated. Both were physicians. In the other branch, however, with the weakened mentality, we find twenty-four victims of this habit so pronounced that they were public nuisances. We have taken no account of the much larger number who were also addicted to its use, but who did not become so bad as to be considered alcoholic in our category. Thus we see that the normal mentality of the good branch of the family was able to cope successfully with this intense thirst, while the weakened mentality on the other side was unable to escape, and many fell victims to this appalling habit.