258 PEARL— EFFECT OF POISONS ON DOMESTIC FOWL. 



produced after the action of the deleterious agent would, on the 

 average, be superior in respect to such qualities as growth, etc., 

 which may be supposed to depend in part at least upon germinal 

 vigor, to a random sample of zygotes formed before the action of 

 the agent, because the germ cells of class (c) are a selected superior 

 portion of the total gametic population. 



7. Essentially that proportionality between effective dosage of 

 the deleterious agent and absolute resisting power of the germ cells 

 outlined in the preceding paragraph (6) is believed to have obtained 

 in the present experiments with fowls, Nice's experiments with 

 mice, and nature's experiments with the workingmen's populations 

 studied statistically by Elderton and Pearson. 



There is much detailed evidence which can be adduced from my 

 own experiments and from the Hterature in support of the above 

 hypothesis. This evidence will be discussed in the complete paper. 



Finally, I wish again to emphasize that, in my opinion, the results 

 here set forth are not contradictory to those of Stockard. Anyone 

 who bases a criticism of his results on the present experiments will 

 go beyond the facts. Our results seem to me to be supplementary 

 to those of Stockard, and to throw an interesting light on the need 

 for caution in reaching a correct interpretation of all experiments in 

 which a mildly deleterious agent acts upon the organism. It would 

 seem clear that there is need for caution in this difficult field. If the 

 conclusions as to the utterly dreadful and relentlessly certain effects 

 of parental alcoholism on the progeny which have been transported, 

 as it seems to me somewhat recklessly, from Stockard's guinea pigs 

 to human beings, were really true for the latter, then I can see no 

 escape from the further conclusion that a great majority of the 

 individuals belonging to the higher intellectual and social classes in 

 the countries of Western Europe today ought to be blind, dwarfed, 

 and degenerate wretches, because social history gives definite and 

 uncontrovertible evidence that their parents and their grandparents 

 on the average consumed proportionately as much and probably 

 more alcohol than the corresponding generations of Stockard's 

 guinea pigs. The absence of general degeneracy in these social 

 classes could not be more completely and scientifically demonstrated 

 than it has been by the events of the past two years. 



The experiments here reported are being continued. 



