a medical rather than a moral question, a great deal of reliable data has accumulated in regard to it as a factor in the heredity of disease.  Grotjahn gives the following examples:  Six families were investigated in which there were thirty-one children.  In all these families the father and grandfather on the father’s side were chronic alcoholics, and in certain of the families drunkenness prevailed in the more remote ancestors.  The following was the fate of the children:  eight died shortly after birth of general weakness, seven died of convulsions in the first month, three were malformed, three were idiotic, three were feeble-minded, three were dwarfs, three were epileptics, two were normal.  In a second group of three families there were twenty children.  The fathers were drunkards, but their immediate ancestors were free:  four children died of general weakness, three of convulsions in the first month, two were feeble-minded, one was a dwarf, one was an epileptic, seven were normal.  In a family in which both father and mother and their ancestors were drunkards there were six children:  three died of convulsions within six months, one was an idiot, one a dwarf, and one an epileptic.  For comparison there were taken from the same station in life ten families in which there was no drunkenness:  three children died from general weakness, three from intestinal troubles, two of nervous affection, two were feeble-minded, two were malformed, fifty were normal.  Legrain has studied on a larger scale the descendants of two hundred and fifteen families of drunkards in which there were eight hundred and nineteen children.  One hundred and forty-five of these were insane, sixty-two were criminals, and one hundred and ninety-seven drunkards.  Of course all this cannot be attributed to alcohol alone.  There is first to be considered a probable variation in the nervous system which is expressed in the alcoholic habit; second, the environment consisting in poverty, bad associates, etc., which the alcoholic habit brings; third, the alcohol alone.  That defective inheritance so frequently takes the form of alcoholism is largely due to the environment.  There has never been the opportunity to study on a large scale the effect of the complete deprivation of alcohol from a people living in the environment of modern civilization.  There is a possibility, and even probability, that the defective nervous organization which predisposes to alcoholism would seek satisfaction in the use of some other sedative drug.  So complex are all the interrelations of the social system that it would be possible to regard alcohol as an agent useful in removing the defective, were it not for its long-enduring action and its effects on the descendants, procreation not being affected by its use.