166 Stockard's Experiments 



tion of the offspring in a general rather than in a 

 specific way. The prejudicial influence may come 

 from treated father or from treated mother, but, as 

 one would expect, it is most marked when it operates 

 through the mother. But in Professor Stockard's 

 experiments, as in some others, the remarkable fact 

 emerges that after three generations of treating, 

 there is a marked improvement. The members of the 

 fourth filial generation of alcoholics were actually 

 superior in vitality to the controls ! This striking re- 

 sult may be due to the elimination of the weaklings 

 and defectives, and this may operate not on the indi- 

 viduals only but on the germ-cells as well. The same 

 kind of elimination has probably occurred in many 

 races of mankind. 



RATS ON A ROUNDABOUT 



When the distinguished Russian physiologist, Pro- 

 fessor Pavlov, was in this country a short time ago 

 one of the many interesting things he alluded to was 

 his experiment with white mice. He trained a lot of 

 them to run to their feeding-place when he rang a bell. 

 Three hundred lessons were needed before the asso- 

 ciation was established. But in the second generation 

 only one hundred lessons were required, in the third 

 only thirty, in the fourth only five. If this is a correct 

 report, the result of Pavlov's experiment is very inter- 

 esting, for it suggests the hereditary entailment of a 

 somewhat subtle "acquired character." In the course 

 of the lessons a neuro-muscular associative linkage 

 was established between bell and food; in the fourth 



