METHODS OF SCHOLASTIC TEACHING 333 



the like did not. Nor did he explain how it was that races which had 

 long suffered from alcohol and syphilis had not become degenerate 

 notwithstanding the alleged inherited deterioration caused by these 

 agencies. Alcohol has been extensively and continuously used by all 

 civilized races for thousands of years, and I have heard a distinguished 

 authority declare that " Civilization is Syphilization." 



On the other hand, medical temperance advocates and alienists were 

 strongly of the opinion that all sorts of agencies affecting parents, 

 including alcoholism and disease, were causes of innate degenerative 

 changes in offspring. They founded these opinions on two classes of 

 " evidence." On the one hand, they argued that, since alcohol and 

 disease are plainly injurious to the individual somatic cells, therefore 

 they must injure the germ-cells, and therefore they must alter for the 

 worse the hereditary tendencies of the germ-plasm. But they failed to 

 demonstrate that the hereditary tendencies of any kind of cells are ever 

 altered by external influences. Again they argued that the parents of 

 lunatics and other degenerates are often drunken, as shown by the 

 statistics of public asylums for the insane. But pauper lunatics are 

 drawn chiefly from the poorer, that is, the more drunken classes, and it 

 was not shown that the sane people of these classes have a smaller 

 proportion of drunken parents than the insane. Dr. Eicholz, on 

 investigating the condition of a poor school at Lambeth, " was informed 

 that there were not more than twelve parents out of two hundred who 

 did not fortify themselves by the irregular use of alcoholic stimulants." 

 Numerous other essential considerations were neglected. (See 264.) 

 The facts of race adaptation under adverse conditions were entirely 

 ignored except by one gentleman, who declared : " In past centuries there 

 have been many instances of drunken nations, whose vitality does not 

 seem to have been greatly interfered with. I attribute this to the fact 

 that in those days the women, the mothers of the race, were sober. But 

 if the mother as well as the father is given to drink, the progeny will 

 deteriorate in every way, and the future of the race is imperilled." 

 Implied in this statement are some novelties. It would seem, since the 

 future of the race as distinguished from that of the individual is 

 imperilled, that germ-plasm, when in a woman, is more susceptible to 

 the influence of alcohol than germ-plasm when in a man. It would 

 seem, also, since no race that has been afflicted by alcohol has undergone 

 progressive deterioration, that female drunkenness is a phenomenon 

 which has occurred for the first time during the last decade or two. It is 

 interesting to remember that Englishwomen formerly drank ale for 

 breakfast, and that Catherine of Russia published a law forbidding 

 women to get drunk before nine o'clock at night. Apparently the 

 committee were inclined to endorse this remarkable essay on heredity. 



It must be noted by the reader that the question whether parental 

 alcoholism and disease produce innate changes in offspring subsequently 

 born has been prominently before the medical profession for several 

 years. There has been more than one long and heated controversy on 

 the subject (see, for example, The Lancet, February to September 1901, 

 and July to October 1903); but from first to last absolutely no evidence 

 demonstrating the alleged influence on the germ-plasm has been pro- 

 duced except of the curious kind referred to above. Thus a research 

 committee was appointed in 1899 by The Society far the Study and Cure 

 of Inebriety, " to investigate the conditions under which the tendency to 

 inebriety is capable of transmission to offspring." The deliberations of 

 the committee turned mainly on the question whether offspring were 



