No. 591] TRANSMISSION OF DEGENERACY 175 



egg giving rise to the female, therefore, contains a greater 

 proportional amount of alcoholic chromatin to normal 

 chromatin than does the egg giving rise to the male. 

 And so the female product is actually more injured than 

 the male. 



A second possible explanation of these conditions may 

 be that the X and Y chromosomes themselves respond 

 differently to the treatment, the X being the more sensi- 

 tive of the two. But in either case the two classes of 

 spermatozoa certainly seem to respond differently to the 

 treatment and this shows a physiological difference in 

 behavior to correspond with the well-known morpholog- 

 ical differences so often found between the two groups of 

 spermatids of many animal species. 



The data from alcoholic female lines indicates that the 

 male offspring from alcoholic females are inferior in 

 quality to the female offspring. And heterogeneous 

 matings of such male and female offspring further prove 

 the inferiority on the part of the male offspring from 

 treated mothers. This is also significant. How can it be 

 put in accord with the above chromosomal explanations 

 for the difference in quality between the female and male 

 young of alcoholized fathers? 



If we admit that all of the eggs arising from an alco- 

 holized female guinea pig are homomorphic and contain 

 groups of chromosomes equal in mass, it follows that her 

 male and female offspring receive the same amount of 

 injured chromatin and should be affected by such chro- 

 matin to equal degrees. But this is only part of the case, 

 the injured female chromatin is combined with normal 

 chromatin from the normal father when the eggs are fer- 

 tilized and here the difference arises. The female off- 

 spring receives from the normal father a larger amount 

 of normal chromatin than do the male offspring. So that 

 the female arises from an egg in which equal amounts of 

 good and injured chromatin are present, while the male 

 offspring arises from an egg in which a larger amount of 

 injured chromatin is united with a smaller amount of 



