ded.

An interesting case is the well-known one recorded by Schweighofer,
which is summarized as follows: "A normal woman married a normal man and
had three sound children. The husband died and the woman married a
drunkard and gave birth to three other children; one of these became a
drunkard; one had infantilism, while the third was a social degenerate
and a drunkard. The first two of these children contracted tuberculosis,
which had never before been in the family. The woman married a third
time and by this sober husband again produced sound children."

Although such evidence is at first sight pertinent, it lacks much of
being convincing. Much must be known about the ancestry of the drunken
husband, and of the woman herself, before it can be certain that the
defective children owe their defect to alcoholism rather than to
heredity.

We can not undertake to review all the literature of this subject, for
it fills volumes, but we shall refer to a few of the studies which are
commonly cited, by the believers in the racial-poison character of
alcohol, as being the most weighty.

Taav Laitinen of Helsingfors secured information from the parents of
2,125 babies, who agreed to weigh their infants once a month for the
first eight months after birth, and who also furnished information about
their own drinking habits. His conclusion is that the average weight of
the abstainer's child is greater at birth, that these children develop
more rapidly during the first eight months than do the children of the
moderate drinker, and that the latter exceed in the same way the
children of the heavier drinker. But a careful analysis of his work by
Karl Pearson, whose great ability in handling statistics has thrown
light on many dark places in the alcohol problem, shows[21] that
Professor Laitinen's statistical methods were so faulty that no weight
can be attached to his conclusions. Furthermore, he appears to have
mixed various social classes and races together without distinction; and
he has made no distinction between parents, one of whom drank, and
parents, both of whom drank. Yet, this distinction, as we have pointed
out, is a critical one for such inquiries. Professor Laitinen's paper,
according to one believer in racial poisons, "surpasses in magnitude and
precision all the many studies of this subject which have proved the
relation between drink and degeneracy." As a fact, it proves nothing of
the sort as to race degeneracy.

Ag