INHEEITED ALCOHOLIC DEGENERATION 65 



that is to say, without alcoholization, and then unrelated bucks 

 and does of this second generation were mated together, instead 

 of their offspring showing a return to or towards the normal, 

 on the contrary the result was worse than when they were mated 

 with wholly normal animals, and their condition was worse 

 than that of their parents. There was a marked tendency to 

 progressive degeneration. In this third generation gross defects 

 presented, and deformities ; 17 per cent of them showed, for 

 example, defects of vision, were either eyeless or with opaque 

 corneas or complete cataracts. Mating together unrelated mem- 

 bers of this third generation, the outcome was yet more unfavour- 

 able, four dying soon after birth and three being completely 

 eyeless. In other words, two alcoholized great-grandfathers 

 influenced the progeny certainly mi to the fourth generation. 



We have here the clearest evidence known to me of the 

 inheritance of acquired defects — evidence that fits in wholly 

 with our routine medical experience of the dangers of marriages 

 in families in which there exist already stigmata of degeneration, 

 diatheses of, various orders, and, more particularly, neuroses, 

 liability to migraine, hysteria, epilepsy, and the like — cases in 

 which there are not necessarily gross anatomical defects, but 

 rather indications of want of full development of those pro- 

 perties of latest phylogenetic acquirement, of the higher mental 

 and co-ordinative powers, and of racial immunity towards the 

 diseases which specially affect man. We note, familiarly, that 

 the children of such marriages are delicate, more liable than 

 other children to succumb to the infections of childhood, more 

 irritable and liable to nervous explosions, if not to one or other 

 nervous disorder, manifesting itself not necessarily in childhood, 

 but in adolescence, when strains which have little or no influence 

 upon normal individuals lead to exhaustion and nervous break- 

 down in one or other direction, according to the nature of the 

 strain. 



With these experiments of Stockard before us it is absurd 

 to postulate that these defects of resistance are atavistic, due 

 to properties which have always been possessed by some one or 

 other strain which has been introduced into the family. To-day 

 we must recognize that infections of one or other order and 

 intoxication are capable of telling upon the parental germ plasm, 

 and that, at some definite point in the line of descent, conditions 



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