156 ON VARIABILITY AND ADAPTATION 



intoxications such as the alcoholic, to be perfectly sure regarding 

 maternal exemption. 



Paul's observations, however, upon the effects of lead-poison- 

 ing afford a most convincing demonstration along the required 

 lines. 1 Plumbism is peculiarly a trade disease. It particu- 

 larly affects those following certain occupations ; thus often the 

 male wage-earning member of the family is alone exposed. 

 Studying the history of thirty-two pregnancies in which the 

 father was the victim of saturnine poisoning, the mother free 

 from the condition, Paul obtained the following remarkable 

 statistics : — 



Twelve resulted in death of the foetus before term (eleven 

 abortions, one child born dead). 



Twenty children were born alive, of which eight died during 

 the first year ; five died during the third year ; one died later ; 

 two alone were found to be living, one aged twenty years, the 

 other only twenty-one months. 2 



In connexion with the effects of paternal syphilis, Fournier 3 

 has contributed strong evidence along the same lines, 

 pointing to the great frequency of arrested development of 

 various orders, from intra-uterine death to infantilism. To his 

 statistics objection may be made that certain of the infants 

 recorded by him probably suffered from the actual disease 

 acquired in utero, secondary to local infection either of the 

 placenta or of the membranes. Discounting this possibility in 

 a certain proportion of cases, his figures still remain very re- 

 markable. But what is needed is a more searching study of 

 these cases of defective children, the offspring of a healthy 

 mother and an infected father, to make sure that we are dealing 

 with parazymotic as distinct from zymotic lesions. 4 In con- 



1 Paul, Arch. gen. de med. xv., 1860, p. 513. 



1 Legendre, in his Essay in Bouchard's Traiti de Pathologic, vol. i. (which in 

 the first place directed me to Constantin Paul's admirable article), gives a table 

 of 141 pregnancies which I cannot find in the paper referred to. Possibly 

 this is from a later article by the same author, but the proportion of abortions 

 as given by him is so much larger that I doubt if this can be the case. 



3 Fournier, quoted by P. Legendre in Bouchard's Traite de pathol. i. 

 p. 363. Of 103 pregnancies in which the father was syphilitic, the mother 

 healthy, 41 children were born dead, 19 born definitely syphilitic, 43 children 

 (not definitely syphilitic) lived but a short period. 



* [It is still a matter of debate as to the relative extent of these inherited, 

 and acquired, parasyphilitic states. With the discovery of the Treponema 

 pallidum, which occurred some few years after the delivery of this address. 



