ALCOHOL, DISEASE, AND HEREDITARY DEFECTS 279 
the children of alcoholic mothers may be that the latter are unable 
to nurse their children as much as mothers not addicted to drink. 
The réle of heredity here is obscured by so many other factors 
that the real hereditary influence of maternal alcoholism re- 
mains in doubt. 
One of the strongest indictments against alcohol is that the 
offspring of people addicted to drink show a high percentage of 
idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy and insanity, and that when they 
escape these graver ills they usually fail to reach a normal degree 
of mental development. The relation of parental alcoholism to 
epilepsy forms the subject of an extensive monograph of Dr. 
Sollier on the Influence of Heredity on Alcoholism. This mono- 
graph is based entirely on the author’s own investigation of three 
hundred and fifty families of alcoholics, one of the members of 
which was or had been in the wards of the asylum for epileptics 
at Bicétre. The histories of a large number of cases are given in 
detail and they contain records of drunkenness, disease, crimes, 
insanity, feeble-mindedness and a variety of other abnormal 
traits. “Out of these three hundred and fifty families,” Sollier 
says, ‘‘there were two hundred and nine in which we could find 
no acknowledged hereditary ancestor whose condition would 
account for the alcoholism. We have however admitted the 
disease without inheritance in two hundred and nine cases, say in 
59.71 per cent of the whole number. In one hundred and forty- 
one cases the alcoholism was linked with conditions of heredity; 
in one hundred and six cases by heredity in similars; in thirty- 
five cases by heredity in dissimilars. . . . The patients in whose 
families we have sought to trace the exciting causes of the dis- 
ease, were all degenerates of a low order, idiotical, incompletely 
developed, feeble, epileptic.” 
The facts stated in the last sentence quoted should warn us 
to be particularly careful in drawing conclusions. How much of 
the degeneration in these families is due to the effect of alcohol 
and how much to bad heredity independent of alcohol we do not 
know. To what an extent the alcoholism which in a number of 
cases occurs in two generations is to be attributed to heredity we 
