Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics

by C. W. Saleeby

“New predispositions can certainly never arise owing to such deviations from the normal course of development, and therefore a modification of the process of heredity itself is out of the question. It is, however, conceivable that more or less considerable abnormalities may affect the course of development, and either cause the death of the embryo, or else produce more or less marked deformities. The question as to whether such deformities really result in consequence of the drunken condition of the parents can only be decided by observation.”[59]

This is all that Weismann has to say on the subject, since, not referring to functionally-produced modifications,[60] it does not concern his theory of heredity at all: yet it is upon this theory that the most palpable facts of the racial influence of alcohol are denied. Weismann's own remarks are quite open to criticism, as, for instance, where he denies that new predispositions can arise in the manner indicated. This is possibly only a question of words, and Weismann is perhaps merely denying that alcohol can produce progressive variations. Also his remarkably brief discussion of the subject seems to concern itself mainly with the influence of alcohol on the germ-cells just before their union. He has not a word to say regarding the influence on the germinal tissues of years of soaking in alcohol. It suffices, however, to make the point which is quite clearly made, that the Weismannians are going absurdly beyond their book in denying what, indeed, the book of Nature demonstrates.

Let us turn now to the experimental side of this question. An American botanist, Dr. T. D. MacDougal, read an address on “Heredity and Environic Forces” at the Chicago Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1907. His experiments require confirmation, but may be provisionally accepted. He has permanently modified the germ-plasm of plants under the influence of various chemicals. There is here a vast field for experiment with alcohol. I quote one paragraph indicating the remarkable results of these experiments. The reader will see their bearing on our present question, and will also see that they do not for a moment affect Weismann's denial of the doctrine that by cutting off rats' tails you can produce a race of tailless rats, or that by learning a language you can save your future children the trouble of doing so for themselves:—

“It was found that the injection of various solutions into ovaries of Raimannia was followed by the production of seeds bearing qualities not exhibited by the parent, wholly irreversible, and fully transmissible in successive generations. One of the seeds produced by a plant of Œnothera biennis which had been treated with zinc sulphate differed so widely from the parental form that it could be distinguished from it by a novice. This new form has been tested to the third generation, and transmits all its characteristics fully.”

Alcohol a proved racial poison.—But the reader will rightly desire some kind of experimental proof that alcohol itself can act as a cause of racial degeneration. We may first refer to the chapter on alcoholism and human degeneration in Dr. W. C. Sullivan's Alcoholism, a Chapter in Social Pathology,[61] for a recent résumé of the subject. Without actually quoting Weismann, Dr. Sullivan begins by showing that, as we have seen, the doctrinal objection of Dr. Reid and others to the theory of alcoholic degeneration is quite irrelevant—“the effects attributed to parental alcoholism are not in the category of transmitted acquirements at all; they are the results, expressed in defect and deviation of development, of a deleterious influence exerted on the germ-cells, either directly through the alcohol circulating in the blood, or indirectly, through the deterioration of the parental organism in which these cells are lodged, and from which they draw their nutriment.” Later Dr. Sullivan points out that the racial effects of alcoholism in man are similar to those obtained by experimental intoxication in the lower animals. Combemale, for instance, found that pups begotten of a healthy bitch by an alcoholised dog were congenitally feeble and showed a marked degree of asymmetry of the brain. Recent experiments have shown the same thing as regards other poisons, and it is especially to be noted that in the experiments cited the mother was healthy. They prove that paternal alcoholism alone (all questions of the nourishment of the growing child before birth, for instance, thus being excluded) can determine degeneration. Mr. Galton[62] himself long ago quoted the case “of a man who, after begetting several normal children, became a drunkard and had imbecile offspring”; and another case has been recorded “of a healthy woman who, when married to a drunken husband, had five sickly children, dying in infancy, but in subsequent union with a healthy man, bore normal and vigorous children.”

Other intoxications show similar results though they are not yet of grave racial importance. For instance, “a man who had had two healthy children acquired the cocaine habit, and while suffering from the symptoms of chronic poisoning engendered two idiots.” Brouardel and others have observed that the expectant mother who is a morphinomaniac may give birth to a child who shows all the phenomena of the morphia habit.

Demme has traced the appalling contrast between the offspring in ten sober families, and in ten families where one or both parents suffered from chronic alcoholism. Dr. Sullivan himself, realising the obviously greater importance of maternal alcoholism, since here we have the action of poisoned food—the maternal blood—upon the child before birth, made an enquiry of his own. He found that

“... of 600 children born of 120 drunken mothers 335 (55.8 per cent.) died in infancy or were still-born, and that several of the survivors were mentally defective, and as many as 4.1 per cent. were epileptic. Many of these women had female relatives, sisters or daughters, of sober habits and married to sober husbands; on comparing the death-rate amongst the children of the sober mothers with that amongst the children of the drunken women of the same stock, the former was found to be 23.9 per cent., the latter 55.2 per cent., or nearly two and a half times as much. It was further observed that in the drunken families there was a progressive rise in the death-rate from the earlier to the later born children.”

Dr. Sullivan cites as a typical alcoholic family one in which “the first three children were healthy, the fourth was of defective intelligence, the fifth was an epileptic idiot, the sixth was dead-born, and finally the productive career ended with an abortion.” Dr. Claye Shaw told the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, “we have inebriate mothers, and either abortions or degenerate children. The teleological[63] relationship between the two seems to be as certain as any other conditions of cause and effect.” The general rule is that any narcotic substance affects highly developed tissues sooner and more markedly than simpler tissues, and so it is in the case of alcohol and the infant. It is the developing nervous system that is most markedly affected. This leads, of course, to an increased child mortality, especially by way of convulsions. This was the cause of sixty per cent. of all the deaths that occurred amongst the six hundred children in Dr. Sullivan's series. But it has especially to be remembered that a large number of children whose nervous systems are injured for life by parental and more especially by maternal alcoholism do not die either as infants or children. Instead of dying of convulsions they live as epileptics. Of the children in Dr. Sullivan's series “219 lived beyond infancy, and of these 9, or 4.1 per cent., became epileptic, as compared with 0.1 per cent. of the whole population.” Other observers have found epilepsy in 12 per cent. and even 15 per cent. of the children of alcoholic parents. Of course these data, as such, do not demonstrate Dr. Sullivan's conclusion that “this action of alcoholism on the health and vitality of the stock is the most serious of the evils that intemperance brings on the community.”