recognized scientific authorities was “contrary sexual feeling” (Kontraere Sexualempfindung).  It was devised by Westphal in 1869, and used by Krafft-Ebing and Moll.  Though thus accepted by the earliest authorities in this field, and to be regarded as a fairly harmless and vaguely descriptive term, it is somewhat awkward, and is now little used in Germany; it was never currently used outside Germany.  It has been largely superseded by the term “homosexuality.”  This also was devised (by a little-known Hungarian doctor, Benkert, who used the pseudonym Kertbeny) in the same year (1869), but at first attracted no attention.  It has, philologically, the awkward disadvantage of being a bastard term compounded of Greek and Latin elements, but its significance—­sexual attraction to the same sex—­is fairly clear and definite, while it is free from any question-begging association of either favorable or unfavorable character. (Edward Carpenter has proposed to remedy its bastardly linguistic character by transforming it into “homogenic;” this, however, might mean not only “toward the same sex,” but “of the same kind,” and in German already possesses actually that meaning.) The term “homosexual” has the further advantage that on account of its classical origin it is easily translatable into many languages.  It is now the most widespread general term for the phenomena we are dealing with, and it has been used by Hirschfeld, now the chief authority in this field, as the title of his encyclopedic work, Die Homosexualitaet.

“Sexual Inversion” (in French “inversion sexuelle,” and in Italian “inversione sessuale”) is the term which has from the first been chiefly used in France and Italy, ever since Charcot and Magnan, in 1882, published their cases of this anomaly in the Archives de Neurologie.  It had already been employed in Italy by Tamassia in the Revista Sperimentale di Freniatria, in 1878.  I have not discovered when and where the term “sexual inversion” was first used.  Possibly it first appeared in English, for long before the paper of Charcot and Magnan I have noticed, in an anonymous review of Westphal’s first paper in the Journal of Mental Science (then edited by Dr. Maudsley) for October, 1871, that “Contraere Sexualempfindung” is translated as “inverted sexual proclivity.”  So far as I am aware, “sexual inversion” was first used in English, as the best term, by J.A.  Symonds in 1883, in his privately printed essay, A Problem in Greek Ethics.  Later, in 1897, the same term was adopted, I believe for the first time publicly in English, in the present work.

It is unnecessary to refer to the numerous other names which have been proposed. (A discussion of the nomenclature will be found in the first chapter of Hirschfeld’s work, Die Homosexualitaet, and of some special terms in an article by Schouten, Sexual-Probleme, December, 1912.) It may suffice to mention the ancient theological and