GENETICS: R. PEARL 
679 
preciable amount of alcohol into the system. In view of all the facts 
this position is an extraordinary naive one and could only be held by 
one who had had no experience with the administration of alcohol by 
the inhalation method. It is true that it is practically impossible to 
induce by the inhalation method in animals habituated to alcohol 
that state of muscular incoordination which is usually, but by no means 
always, the most striking objective symptom of the condition of being 
drunk. On the other hand, it is extremely easy to kill an animal with 
ethyl or methyl alcohol administered by the inhalation method, quite 
regardless of whether it is or is not habituated to the substance. If 
the animal *gets no appreciable amount of alcohol in its system' in 
the course of one hour's sojourn in a tank containing alcohol vapor it 
is extraordinarily difficult to understand how it manages to accumu- 
late a fatally toxic dose of alcohol by staying in the same tank under 
the same conditions for from 20 minutes to half an hour longer. This 
is not only true for my fowls, for which the above time relations hold, 
but also, with other time relations, for mammals, as lately shown by 
Tyson and Schoenberg^ in the case of methyl alcohol. Thirty-eight 
years ago Poincare^ demonstrated extensive and grave lesions in ani- 
mals subjected to the continuous inhalation of methyl alcohol vapor. 
It appears to be impossible, in the present development of the tech- 
nique, to state the exact dosage per kilogram of body weight of alcohol 
administered by the inhalation method. I am now working on an in- 
direct method of measuring the dosage, logically based upon the same 
reasoning as is used in the so-called 'physiological assay' of drugs. As 
a first contribution in this direction I wish to present some data regard- 
ing the immediate physiological effect of the administration of ethyl 
and methyl alcohol to fowls thoroughly habituated to these substances. 
These observations have to do with respiration rate (respirations per 
minute) and rectal temperature (in degrees Fahrenheit). They are 
set forth in Table 3. Owing to lack of space this table gives mean 
values only, observations will be reported in a complete paper later. 
The means undoubtedly understate the true differences between the 
different groups because they include all the observations, some of 
which were made on cold days and before the apparatus for main- 
taining a constant temperature for the evaporation of the alcohol 
had been perfected. On such days the dosages, and in consequence 
the physiological differences, were reduced. By 'tanked controls' 
in the second line is meant birds which were put for one hour in a tank 
precisely like the alcohol tanks, but in which there was no alcohol or 
alcohol vapor. 
