144 CHARLES R. STOCKARD AND GEORGE N. PAPANICOLAOU 



for instance, may not be affected, although the germ plasm might 

 be so seriously altered as to give rise to the most extremely ab- 

 normal individuals. The same would apply to the very few other 

 characters in mammals the inheritance of which have been 

 studied from the Mendelian standpoint. 



Finally, then, the fact that the soma seems little injured by 

 the alcoholic inhalations is in no way an index of what may be 

 expected from the development of the germ cells of guinea-pigs 

 which have been under habitual treatment. 



Arlitt and Wells have very recently reported that the admin- 

 istration of alcohol in the food of male white rats for two or 

 more months results almost constantly in the appearance of 

 marked degenerative alterations in the testicles although other 

 organs were apparently uninjured. They find that these changes 

 affect the steps of spermatogenesis in inverse order to their 

 occurrence, so that for some time before sterility and complete 

 aspermia result, the animal is producing spermatozoa with all 

 possible degrees of abnormality. The probable relation of such 

 phenomena to the production of defective offspring is obvious. 



A general survey of the progeny from the normal and alcoholic 

 lines as a whole will first be undertaken and is based on the data 

 presented in table 1. In this table the animals are arranged in 

 four groups, the first column containing the records of those 

 produced by normal control matings without inbreeding, the 

 third column records of normal animals somewhat inbred, while 

 the second column gives similar records for animals produced in 

 the alcoholic lines without inbreeding, and the fourth-column 

 animals are not only alcoholic, but also somewhat inbred. The 

 table contains in all records of 1170 animals, from our catalogue 

 numbers 613 to 1909 except 126 animals that could not properly 

 be included such as 39 new stock adults, 22 killed for different 

 purposes during early embryonic life, 31 derived from mothers 

 with only one ovary, and others too heterogeneous in origin, as 

 those from ancestors treated during pregnancy, etc., to be cer- 

 tainly placed. They represent, as stated above, the animals 

 produced during the sixth and seventh years of the experi- 

 ment and none from the earlier years. 



The figures of the first horizontal space may be used to indicate 



