greatly attracted to music, the women being decidedly less attracted.  Oppenheim (in a paper summarized in the Neurologische Centralblatt for June 1, 1910, and the Alienist and Neurologist for Nov., 1910) well remarks that the musical disposition is marked by a great emotional instability, and this instability is a disposition to nervousness.  It is thus that neurasthenia is so common among musicians.  The musician has not been rendered nervous by the music, but he owes his nervousness (as also, it may be added, his disposition to homosexuality) to the same disposition to which he owes his musical aptitude.  Moreover, the musician is frequently one-sided in his gifts, and the possession of a single hypertrophied aptitude is itself closely related to the neuropathic and psychopathic diathesis.

The tendency to dramatic aptitude—­found among a large proportion of my subjects who have never been professional actors—­has attracted the attention of previous investigators in this field.[221] Thus, Moll refers to the frequency of artistic, and especially dramatic, talent among inverts, and remarks that the cause is doubtful.  After pointing out that the lie which they have to be perpetually living renders inverts always actors, he goes on to say:—­

Apart from this, it seems to me that the capacity and the inclination to conceive situations and to represent them in a masterly manner corresponds to an abnormal predisposition of the nervous system, just as does sexual inversion; so that both phenomena are due to the same source.

I am in agreement with this statement; the congenitally inverted may, I believe, be looked upon as a class of individuals exhibiting nervous characters which, to some extent, approximate them to persons of artistic genius.  The dramatic and artistic aptitudes of inverts are, therefore, partly due to the circumstances of the invert’s life, which render him necessarily an actor,—­and in some few cases lead him into a love of deception comparable with that of a hysterical woman,—­and partly, it is probable, to a congenital nervous predisposition allied to the predisposition to dramatic aptitude.

One of my correspondents has long been interested in the frequency of inversion among actors and actresses.  He knew an inverted actor who told him he adopted the profession because it would enable him to indulge his proclivity; but, on the whole, he regards this tendency as due to “hitherto unconsidered imaginative flexibilities and curiosities in the individual.  The actor, ex hypothesi, is one who works himself by sympathy (intellectual and emotional) into states of psychological being that are not his own.  He learns to comprehend—­nay, to live himself into—­relations which were originally alien to his nature.  The capacity for doing this—­what makes a born actor—­implies a faculty for extending his artistically acquired experience into life.  In the process of his trade, therefore, he becomes