[To TRII EDITOR OF Till "SPRCTATOR."1 Sza,—In your review in
the Spectator of February 3rd of Sir Thomas Clouston's book on " Unsoundness of Mind " you refer to Professor Karl Pearson's recent statements. As those statements and those of an active and much-respected English worker for the good of the feeble-minded, who asserts that, while feeble-mindedness is a cause of drunkenness, drunkenness does not cause feeble-mindedness, tend to lessen the desire of the community to get rid, as far as possible, of the causes of excessive drinking, I think that it may be well to call attention to the fact that in Germany and Switzerland. where more feeble-minded persons are under observation than in this country, all scientific observers seem to be convinced that drunkenness is one of the chief causes of feeble-minded- ness. In support of this statement I will copy a few of the notes which I have made in the last month or two from the carefully edited Zeitschrift filr Schulgesundheitspflege, which publishes extracts from the annual reports of many schools and other institutions for feeble-minded children : " Dr. Koller, of Herisau, well known for his admirable statistics of the feeble-minded in the Canton of Appenzell, at a Congress held in Berne last May divided the causes of feeble-mindedness in children into two groups : (a) those which affect the child; (b) those which pre-exist in the parents. The causes of the (a) group account for only one-seventh of the observed cases of feeble-mindedness according to the Appenzell figures, and those of the (b) group for six-sevenths. Here the chief are drunkenness, weak-mindedness, and syphilis; and chronic alcoholic poisoning is the most noxious of them. Switzerland has thirty-two institutions for the feeble-minded with 5,586 inmates, and ninety-one special classes for feeble-minded children with 2,009 scholars and ninety-six teachers. Many of these institutions were repre- sented at the Congress, and no dissent from Dr. Koller's statements was expressed." My next note gives a kind of evidence respecting the influence of the excessive use of alcohol by parents on the mental condition of their children, which seems to me to be very valuable, and which can only be obtained in countries where there is much more drunkenness at one season than during the rest of the year. " In the part for May and June 1911 of the Hcilpadagogische Schul- and Elternzeitung R. Preiss, of Vienna, shows that the statistics collected by the Swiss mental specialist, Dr. Bezzola, prove that in Switzerland most idiots are born about nine months after the season in which most drinking takes place."—I am,
Sir, &c., T. C. HOELBFALL. Swanscoe Park, near Macclesfield.
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