Influence of Alcohol 163 



f erred to) were in the direction of inferiority in the 

 case of guinea-pigs. Here we face an interesting fact, 

 that while no deleterious effect on body or life was 

 discernible in the treated parents, such an effect was 

 clearly observable in their untreated offspring. 



But the complexity of the problem grows when we 

 pass from Professor Charles R. Stockard's treated 

 guinea-pigs to Professor Raymond Pearl's treated 

 fowls. For it was found that after alcohol treatment 

 the fowls produced offspring which were superior in 

 a marked degree to those produced by non-treated 

 controls. Professor Pearl accounts for this by the 

 ingenious theory that the alcoholic treatment killed 

 off or eliminated all the inferior germ-cells in the 

 fowls, leaving the coast clear for the superior ones 

 to produce the next generation. That there actually 

 is this process of germinal selection or germ-cell sift- 

 ing seems to have been proved by the investigations 

 of Dr. Danforth. 



Experiments on rats conducted for half a dozen 

 years by Dr. MacDowell did not reveal any appre- 

 ciable structural damage as the result of the alcoholic 

 treatment, but they yielded a result of high interest 

 — namely, a reduction in the capacity for learning 

 in the treated generation, and a persistence of this 

 effect to the next generation, even when the animals 

 were kept strictly "dry." The capacity for learning 

 to do certain things, such as getting out of a maze, 

 can be tested quantitatively, and the figures show 

 that it is not improved by sniffing alcohol. 



Some interesting experiments on white rats are 







