NARCOTICS 197 



its past experience of the poison. The South Europeans and 

 the Jews are the most temperate peoples in the world. 

 West Africans also are very temperate. 1 North Europeans 

 are more drunken. Those savages, and those only, who 

 have had little or no experience of alcohol Esquimaux, 

 Red Indians, Patagonians, Terra del Fuegians, Australian 

 blacks are beyond all the peoples the most drunken on 

 earth. 



332. Stated in this brief and direct way the thesis is apt 

 to excite incredulity. It is sharply opposed to popular 

 beliefs, though that need not trouble us. Popular notions on 

 abstruse points of science are occasionally erroneous. Of more 

 importance is the fact that a mass of statistics purporting to 

 prove that the children of drunkards tend to be degenerate 

 has been compiled, especially by medical men in charge of 

 lunatic asylums. But no " control " observations appear to 

 have been made. We know that many drunken parents have 

 normal children ; certainly, therefore, parental drunkenness is 

 not invariably a cause of filial degeneration. We know also 

 that many temperate parents have defective children. There 

 is nothing to show that the proportion is greater in the one 

 case than in the other. Even were it established that the 

 proportion of defective children is higher in the case of 

 drunken parents it would still have to be proved that the 

 relation is one of cause and effect. People who have an 

 inborn tendency to mental defect, who are abnormally 

 depressed, nervous, restless, or irritable, are often so consti- 

 tuted as to find solace in drink. Their children are liable to 

 inherit their inborn mental defects with spontaneous vari- 

 ations ; that is, to inherit the defect to a greater or lesser 

 extent. The unborn child of a drunken and pregnant 

 mother is practically another drunken person, as liable, or 

 more liable, to suffer from the effects of drink ; but in such 

 a case the resulting defect, though a mere acquirement, is 

 tolerably certain to be regarded as a congenital (i. e. inborn) 

 defect by the medical man who sees it. Mere acquirements, 

 also, are the defects due to the ill-treatment, want and neglect 

 to which the children of drunken parents are particularly 

 exposed. Indeed, were it fully established that drunken 

 parents, other than pregnant mothers, tend to have an 

 excessive number of their children " congenitally defective," 

 it would still be a question whether the filial defects were 

 not mere acquirements. Professor Cossar Ewart's observ- 

 ations on diseased pigeons render this not unlikely. All 

 1 See Alcoholism, pp. 258-62. 



