ain, T. A. MacNicholl reported on 55,000 American school children,
from 20,147 of whom he secured information about the parents' attitude
to alcoholic drinks. He found an extraordinarily large proportion (58%)
of deficient and backward children in the group. But the mere bulk of
his work, probably, has given it far more prestige than it deserves; for
his methods are careless, his classifications vague, his information
inadequate; he seems to have dealt with a degenerate section of the
population, which does not offer suitable material for testing the
question at issue; and he states that many of the children drank and
smoked,--hence, any defects found in them may be due to their own
intemperance, rather than that of their parents. In short, Dr.
MacNicholl's data offer no help in an attempt to decide whether
alcoholism is an inheritable effect.

Another supposed piece of evidence which has deceived a great many
students is the investigation of Bezzola into the distribution of the
birth-rate of imbeciles in Switzerland. He announced that in
wine-growing districts the number of idiots conceived at the time of the
vintage and carnival is very large, while at other periods it is almost
_nil_. The conclusion was that excesses of drunkenness occurring in
connection with the vintage and carnival caused this production of
imbeciles. But aside from the unjustified assumptions involved in his
reasoning, Professor Pearson has recently gone over the data and shown
the faulty statistical method; that, in fact, the number of imbeciles
conceived at vintage-time, in excess of the average monthly number, was
only three in spite of the large numbers! Bezzola's testimony, which has
long been cited as proof of the disastrous results of the use of alcohol
at the time of conception, must be discarded.

Demme's plausible investigation is also widely quoted to support the
belief that alcohol poisons the germ-plasm. He studied the offspring of
10 drunken and 10 sober pairs of parents, and found that of the 61
children of the latter, 50 were normal, while of the 57 progeny of the
drunkards, only nine were normal. This is a good specimen of much of the
evidence cited to prove that alcohol impairs the germ-plasm; it has been
widely circulated by propagandists in America during recent years. Of
course, its value depends wholly on whether the 20 pairs of parents were
of sound, comparable stock. Karl Pearson has pointed out that this is
not the case.