A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF 

 ADMINISTERING ETHYL ALCOHOL TO THE 

 LEPIDOPTEROUS INSECT SELENIA BILU- 

 NARIA, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO 

 THE OFFSPRING. 



By J. W. HESLOP HARRISON, D.Sc. 



I. Introductory. 



My attention was first drawn to the present subject during the 

 course of an examination of the facts published by Morgan and his 

 pupils concerning their work on the fruit fly, Drosophila ampelophila. 

 No one can study that work without being struck by the immense 

 number of hereditable variations which have appeared, and continue to 

 appear, in their cultures. So great and important are these when com- 

 pared with the few similar mutations encountered, in Nature that one 

 is almost forced to the conclusion that in some way or other the technique 

 employed is correlated with the observed results. Having conceived 

 this notion, I submitted their methodsi to careful scrutiny but could 

 only find one definite point in which their procedure differed from that 

 followed by me when rearing lepidoptera or phytophagous hymenoptera 

 or coleoptera, and that was that every individual fly used in the cultures 

 had, at some period of its life, undergone etherisation ; that fact naturally 

 attracted suspicion. Moreover, these suspicions were strengthened when 

 brought into conjunction with the wonderful tales one hears of the 

 degeneracy in the offspring of alcoholic parents, as well as with the 

 actual impairment of the young seen by Stockard in his alcoholised 

 guinea-pigs. It thus seemed exceedingly probable that these effects 

 were directly induced by the action of the ether on the germ cells of the 

 parents at some very susceptible stage of their existence. Further, after 

 careful consideration, it appeared in my view to follow as a natural 

 corollary that if the single etherisation of the Drosophila flies were re- 

 placed by the continuous exposure of the organism throughout the 



