[56] Italics mine.
[57] To-day many of the children who make our destiny are born drunk, owing to maternal intoxication during labour: I have myself attended the birth of such children, both in Edinburgh and in York.
[58] This was written in 1892, before the accumulation of the modern evidence on the subject.
[59] “Alcohol taken into the stomach can be demonstrated in the testicle or ovary within a few minutes, and, like any other poison, may injure the sperm or the germ element therein contained. As a result of this intoxication of the primary elements, children may be conceived and born who become idiots, epileptics, or feeble-minded. Therefore it comes about that even before conception a fault may be present.”—McAdam Eccles, F.R.C.S., in the British Journal of Inebriety, April, 1908.
[61] London: James Nisbet and Co., 1906.
[62] Will our modern extremists be good enough to remember that Mr. Galton is the prime author of the doctrine that functionally-produced modifications are not inherited?
[63] The use of this word thus is unusual, to say the least of it. Dr. Claye Shaw simply means causal relation.
[64] The subject of alcoholism and race-culture really demands a large volume. There is no space here to detail the fashion in which the drunken mother poisons her child after birth, when she nurses it, since, as has been chemically proved, alcohol is excreted in her milk. Says a most distinguished authority, Mrs. Scharlieb, “the child, then, absolutely receives alcohol as part of his diet, with the worst effect upon his organs, for alcohol has a greater effect upon cells in proportion to their immaturity” (“The Drink Problem,” in the New Library of Medicine), and Dr. Sullivan refers to “numerous cases on record of convulsions and other disorders occurring in infants when the nurse has taken liquor, and ceasing when she has been put on a non-alcoholic diet.” The reader may be referred to my brief paper, “Alcohol and Infancy,” published in the form of a tract by the Church of England Temperance Society.
[65] This is printed in the British Journal of Inebriety, January, 1908, under the title “Inebriety, its Causation and Control”—with comments by numerous authorities.