The Durham Daily Globe

The Offspring of Drunkards.

Demme studied ten families of drinkers and ten families of sober persons. The direct posterity of the ten families of drinkers numbered fifty-seven children. Of these twenty-five died in the first week of life; nine of them had rickets; six were idiots; children's striking cases of various other abnormal unnatural growth; only five were affected with epilepsy; five with lung diseases; one was taken with colic and became white. Of the fifty-seven children of drinkers only ten, or 15 per cent., survived natural constitution and development.

The ten sober families had sixty-one children. Only five dying in the first weeks; four were affected with incurable diseases; feeble-minded, scrofulous system: two only of these. The remaining fifty-seven children were normal in constitutional development.

From this series of investigations we deduce the sad truth that among the children of drinkers the prevailing mortality is fearful, that the survivors represent a pitiful crew afflicted with weakness of mind, idiocy, epilepsy and other disorders of their nervous system, and that only a very small proportion of the descendants grow up useful members of society.—Catholic Review.