4 A REPLY TO CRITICISMS OF THE 



not write for people who only read the wrappers of papers. 

 On the very first page of our memoir occur the following 

 words : 



' The child may be physically and mentally fit, and yet 

 when adult may exhibit alcoholic tendencies. This is the 

 direct heredity of alcoholism. It is a subject not touched 

 on in this paper. ... It may be demonstrable to the hilt, 

 and possibly justify the seclusion of the alcoholic ; it does 

 not occupy us in this present study ; we are concerned only 

 with the offspring of the alcoholic as children ' ^ (p. i). 



In the ' conclusions ' the words * child ' and * children ' 

 are used repeatedly, and facing the conclusions are tables 

 giving the ages of the children considered ; references to the 

 ages of the children occur frequently in the text, and on p. 6 

 the average ages of the sons of drinking and non-drinking 

 parents are actually stated as 9-8 and 9-4 years respectively. 

 Sir Victor Horsley and Dr. Sturge tell us under a heading 

 Unscientific Use of Terms^ that a second instance of this is 

 our misuse of the term ' offspring '. They further go on to 

 say that we ought at least to trace the effect of alcohol 

 beyond the age of 14, and that Dr. Maurice Craig has 

 pointed out that the next two decades following the four- 

 teenth year are those during which symptoms of degeneracy 

 usually appear.^ Why we ought to have done what we 

 initially excluded from the exact ' universe of discussion ' is 

 not obvious ; and the only misuse of terms that we can 

 discover is the attempt of our critics to foist into a word, 

 the use of which is expressly defined on our first page, 

 a meaning which we had excluded from it. 



The next point is our definition of * sober * and 'alcoholic '. 



^ Italics in the original. 



2 If Dr. Craig's view be correct, why have Sir Victor and Dr. Sturge quoted 

 with approval Dr. Nichol's observations on school children of like age to oursl 

 See their Alcohol and the Human Body, 1907, p. 325. 



