INTOXICATION OF THE GERM CELLS 63 



employing chickens, and Watson, 1 working under Mott in London 

 and employing guinea-pigs, obtained results of the same order 

 by successive inoculations of the phytotoxin, abrin, to which 

 I have already referred. Both observers noted the resultant 

 diminished fertility, increase in the number of still-births, and 

 lowered vitality of those of the offspring that survived birth, 

 and both, like Carriere in the case of tuberculin, note particularly 

 that the offspring, instead of being immunized to the individual 

 toxin, are on the contrary distinctly more susceptible. Their 

 observations are on a par with the frequent clinical rinding that 

 the children of those suffering from advancing tuberculosis are 

 more liable to succumb to tuberculosis than are those of healthy 

 individuals. We have here the explanation of the tuberculous 

 diathesis. 2 



The most conclusive observations, however, are those of 

 Professor Stockard 3 of Cornell Medical College, New York ; and 

 this in a field in which, although generations of medical men 

 have been convinced that they saw definite effects of a drug 

 .descending upon the offspring, nevertheless social surroundings 

 have so complicated the subject that it seemed almost impossible 

 to arrive at a sure conclusion. It is indeed significant as to 

 the value of the pure statistical method and of Biometrics as 

 applied to the problems of evolution that Professor Karl Pearson 4 

 deduced from his Edinburgh statistics that the children of 

 alcoholics in the Scotch capital are, if anything, superior in 

 capacity to those of abstainers. 



Any one who has had dealings with a guinea-pig knows how 

 small and well guarded is its mouth, so that forced and exact 

 feeding of these animals is out of the question. By a very 



1 Watson, British Medical Journal, 1905, ii. 1091. 



2 Let me confess that I am prepared to find that the cautious administration 

 of smaller doses of toxin over longer periods will have the contrary effect, that 

 of developing increased resistance in the offspring. 



3 Arch. f. Entwick.-Mechanik, xxxv., 1912; Archives of Internal Medicine, 

 x., 1912; and American Naturalist, xlvii., 1913. 



4 See correspondence between Professor Pearson and the late Sir Victor 

 Horsley in the British Medical Journal, 1911. All the same let me admit that 

 I am not a little attracted by Dr. Archdall Reid's contention that alcoholism, 

 by causing the further degeneration and eventual extinction of weakling strains, 

 if ruinous to the individual of these strains, is of ultimate benefit to the race. 

 But this does not signify that per contra alcohol is of benefit to the sound stock, 

 or that, as Professor Pearson's Edinburgh figures might infer, the more tem- 

 perate inhabitants of the Scottish capital are a weaklier lot than those who 

 partake freely of the national beverage. 



