Prison life develops and fosters the homosexual tendency of criminals; but there can be little doubt that that tendency, or else a tendency to sexual indifference or bisexuality, is a radical character of a very large number of criminals.  We may also find it to a considerable extent among tramps, an allied class of undoubted degenerates, who, save for brief seasons, are less familiar with prison life.  I am able to bring forward interesting evidence on this point by an acute observer who lived much among tramps in various countries, and largely devoted himself to the study of them.[48]

The fact that homosexuality is especially common among men of exceptional intellect was long since noted by Dante:—­

    “In somma sappi, che tutti fur cherci
    E litterati grandi, et di gran fama
    D’un medismo peccato al mondo lerci."[49]

It has often been noted since and remains a remarkable fact.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that intellectual and artistic abilities of the highest order have frequently been associated with a congenitally inverted sexual temperament.  There has been a tendency among inverts themselves to discover their own temperament in many distinguished persons on evidence of the most slender character.  But it remains a demonstrable fact that numerous highly distinguished persons, of the past and the present, in various countries, have been inverts.  I may here refer to my own observations on this point in the preface.  Mantegazza (Gli Amori degli Uomini) remarks that in his own restricted circle he is acquainted with “a French publicist, a German poet, an Italian statesman, and a Spanish jurist, all men of exquisite taste and highly cultivated mind,” who are sexually inverted.  Krafft-Ebing, in the preface to his Psychopathia Sexualis, referring to the “numberless” communications he has received from these “step-children of nature,” remarks that “the majority of the writers are men of high intellectual and social position, and often possess very keen emotions.”  Raffalovich (Uranisme, p. 197) names among distinguished inverts, Alexander the Great, Epaminondas, Virgil, the great Conde, Prince Eugene, etc. (The question of Virgil’s inversion is discussed in the Revista di Filologia, 1890, fas. 7-9, but I have not been able to see this review.) Moll, in his Beruehmte Homosexuelle (1910, in the series of Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens) discusses the homosexuality of a number of eminent persons, for the most part with his usual caution and sagacity; speaking of the alleged homosexuality of Wagner he remarks, with entire truth, that “the method of arguing the existence of homosexuality from the presence of feminine traits must be decisively rejected.”  Hirschfeld has more recently included in his great work Die Homosexualitaet (1913, pp. 650-674) two lists, ancient and modern, of alleged inverts among the distinguished persons of history, briefly