alike great strength and classic proportions, the muscular contours smoothly rounded with adipose tissue.  My hands and feet are small.  My penis, though perfectly shaped, is rather enormous—­erect, ten and a half inches in length, seven and a quarter inches in circumference.

“Some abetment of my apostasy from orthodox methods was, no doubt, this hypertrophy of the penis, which already in my twentieth year had acquired its present redundance, rendering coitus impracticable with most women I essayed and painful where insertion was effected.  Since falling heir to inversion, a unique recurrence of normal desire, six years ago, persuaded me to attempt coitus with eleven or twelve prostitutes, and, strangely enough, with much of the old-time salacity and full erection, but, as it chanced, always with too great disparity of parts for success.”

A certain preciosity in the manner of this communication may be put down partly to the nature of the literary avocations with which the writer is by preference occupied, and partly, no doubt more fundamentally, to the special character of his predominantly esthetic temperament and attraction to the exotic.  An attraction for exotic experiences will not, however, suffice to account for the rather late development of homosexual tendencies, a late development which may be held to place this case in the retarded group of inverts.  H.C. has himself pointed out to me that his aversion to women, beginning to appear in the eighteenth year, was already well pronounced before he had ever heard definitely of specific homosexual acts, and fully a year before he experienced the slightest sexual interest in men or boys.  Moreover, while it is true that the actual tendency to homosexual attraction only appeared after he had read Krafft-Ebing and come in contact with inverts, such influences would not suffice to change the sexual nature of a normally constituted man.

It may be added that H.C. is not attracted to normal males.  As regards his moral attitude he remarks:  “I have no scruples in the indulgence of my passion.  I perceive the moral objections advanced, but how speculative they are, and constructive; while, immediately, inversion is the source of so much good.”  He looks upon the whole sexual question as largely a matter of taste.

I regard the foregoing case as of considerable interest.  It presents what is commonly supposed to be a very common type of inversion, Oscar Wilde being the supreme exemplar, in which a heterosexual person apparently becomes homosexual by the exercise of intellectual curiosity and esthetic interest.  In reality the type is far from common; indeed, an intellectual curiosity and an esthetic interest, strong enough even apparently to direct the sexual impulse in any new channel, are themselves far from common.  Moreover, a critical reading of this history suggests that the apparent control over the sexual impulse by reason is merely a superficial phenomenon.  Here, as ever, reason is but a tool in the hands of the passions.  The apparent causes are really the results; we are witnessing the gradual emergence of a retarded homosexual impulse.