rson in a Report upon "the
influence of parental alcoholism upon the offspring," and the
conclusions of that Report have been widely circulated and are being
circulated almost wherever the monetary interest of alcohol has power.
Briefly, Professor Pearson came to the conclusion that the children of
drunken parents are, on the average, superior to those of sober parents
in physique and in intelligence, in sight and in freedom from epilepsy
and other diseases. This, of course, as everybody knows, is obvious
nonsense, and the only problem remaining is how to account for its
assertion. I have dealt with that question at length elsewhere,[24] and
here need only note in a word that Professor Pearson's Report includes
no comparison between the children of abstainers and drinkers, since the
number of abstainers was too few to be treated separately; that
Professor Pearson attaches no strict meaning to the term alcoholism, by
which he means anything from what the word really means down to a
general suspicion that the parents were drinking more than was good for
themselves or their home; and finally that in studying the influence of
alcohol upon offspring Professor Pearson has omitted to enquire in a
single case whether the alcoholism or the offspring came first. The
Report has no scientific basis whatever and has been riddled with
criticism by expert students of every kind, including not merely
students of alcoholism but also Professor Alfred Marshall of Cambridge,
the greatest English-speaking economist of the time, who has shown that
there are no grounds for the assumptions made by Professor Pearson in
that part of his argument which is based upon the economic efficiency of
drinking and non-drinking parents. The publication of this Report merely
hastens the rapid decadence of "biometry," the foundations of which have
already been sapped by the re-discovery of Mendelism in 1900; but it was
necessary to refer to the matter here, since in the advertisements and
the other printed matter paid for by the alcoholic party, the public is
being informed that the children of alcoholic parents have been proved
to be, on the whole, superior to those of non-alcoholic parents. This
question has been exhaustively studied, yet again, in London by Dr.
Sullivan, in Helsingfors by Professor Laitinen, and also in New York in
an enquiry which actually embraced no less than fifty-five thousand
school children. The elementary fallacies entertained by Pr