PARENTAL ALCOHOLISM AND THE PROGENY 243 



trols on the alcoholic matings. When cf 666 was autopsied the 

 testes were found to be very small, much under size for a bird 

 of his age and body weight. He was apparently a naturally 

 impotent male, of a sort that occurs not infrequently in poultry 

 breeding operations. Owing to his deceptively vigorous behavior 

 it was too late in the year to substitute another bird in his place 

 when it was finally proven that he was worthless as a breeder. 



In consequence of the failure of this cr666 we are compelled 

 to resort to other data to furnish proper controls for the fertility 

 and hatching data. Fortunately such data are at hand from 

 other experiments, and are entirely adequate both in kind and 

 amount. For comparison with the results of the alcoholic mat- 

 ings there will be used in this section of the paper the results 

 from a random sample, comprising 22 matings, from all of the 

 1915 matings of normal untreated birds in which the female 

 partner was a pure Barred Plymouth Rock. A sample of 22 

 matings is taken because that is the number of matings in which 

 one or both of the animals involved was a treated bird. 



The data for the treated matings are given in table 1. The 

 arrangement and meaning of the captions of this and the next 

 table need some explanation. In the column headed 'Eggs set' 

 is given for each mating the total number of eggs which went 

 into the incubator from that mating. The percent of infertile 

 eggs (5th column) is calculated on this total. An infertile egg 

 is one in which there has been no union of sperm and ovum, 

 i.e., no zygote formation. In the 'Died in shell' column is given 

 the number of embryos which, having started development, 

 died before actually hatching. The 'Per cent of embryos dying 

 in shell' is calculated on the basis of the number of fertile eggs, 

 according to the following formula: 



100 (Died in shell) 



—- ; -— — -— = Per cent of embryos dying in shell 



(Eggs set) - (Infertile) ^ "^ 



Other captions are self explanatory. 



The control data for comparison are given in table 2. 



From these tables the following points are to be noted: 



1. All of the treated males were clearly entirely potent. This 



is proved by the fact that certain of the matings in each sub- 



