288 THE TREND OF THE RACE 



feet is antecedent to their alcoholism. But because the bulk 

 of the mentally defective became criminal or alcoholic it does not 

 follow that every alcoholist is mentally defective, and will breed 

 mentally defective children." 



Another objection to the conclusions of Elderton and Pearson 

 is that in no case was it certain whether or not the parents began 

 their alcoholic habits before the birth of the offspring. It is a fair 

 presumption, from what is known of the persistence of habits in 

 human beings, that the parents who were alcoholic after their 

 children became of school age were in most cases more or less 

 alcoholic before their children were bom. Of course the alcoholic 

 habits of people are subject to much variation, and some parents 

 may have used alcohol before their children were bom and after- 

 ward became sober, and in other parents the alcoholic history may 

 have been just the reverse. To the extent that such changes 

 occur, whatever correlations may exist between parental alco- 

 holism and the characteristics of offspring would not be revealed 

 by the statistical methods employed. The presence of fluctua- 

 tions in the alcoholic habits of parents would naturally weaken 

 the correlations that might exist between alcoholism of parents 

 and peculiarities of their children. These correlations would be 

 further weakened by the fact that the classes compared were not 

 as sharply defined as would be desirable. The teetotalers were 

 unfortunately very few in number and for statistical treatment 

 they were usually grouped with the sober or those who drank but 

 little. For the same reason the small group of those ''suspected 

 to drink" were combined with the drinkers. 



The investigation of Elderton and Pearson is of a type that it is 

 desirable to see extended to further data. If the results do not 

 justify a final verdict, — and the authors make no sweeping claims 

 for the general applicability of their conclusions, — the fault lies in 

 the inlierent difficulty of the problem rather than in the imperfec- 

 tions of the methods employed. The authors set about investi- 

 gating a particular set of data bearing on a most important prob- 

 lem, and they stated their precise findings and some conclusions 

 that could and some that could not be drawn from their data. If 



