moved to write this book by a trial which had excited considerable attention at that time.  A man of good position had suddenly murdered a youth, and was executed for the crime, which, according to Hoessli, was due to homosexual love and jealousy.  Hoessli was not a trained scholar; he was in business at Glarus as a skillful milliner, the most successful in the town.  His own temperament is supposed to have been bisexual.  His book was prohibited by the local authorities and at a later period the entire remaining stock was destroyed in a fire, so that its circulation was very small.  It is now, however, regarded by some as the first serious attempt to deal with the problem of homosexuality since Plato’s Banquet.[115]

Some years later, in 1852, Casper, the chief medico-legal authority of his time in Germany,—­for it is in Germany that the foundations of the study of sexual inversion have been laid,—­pointed out in Casper’s Vierteljahrsschrift that pederasty, in a broad sense of the word, was sometimes a kind of “moral hermaphroditism,” due to a congenital psychic condition, and also that it by no means necessarily involved sodomy (immissio penis in anum).  Casper brought forward a considerable amount of valuable evidence concerning these cardinal points, which he was the first to note,[116] but he failed to realize the full significance of his observations, and they had no immediate influence, though Tardieu, in 1858, admitted a congenital element in some pederasts.

The man, however, who more than anyone else brought to light the phenomena of sexual inversion had not been concerned either with the medical or the criminal aspects of the matter.  Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (born in 1825 near Aurich), who for many years expounded and defended homosexual love, and whose views are said to have had some influence in drawing Westphal’s attention to the matter, was a Hanoverian legal official (Amtsassessor), himself sexually inverted.  From 1864 onward, at first under the name of “Numa Numantius” and subsequently under his own name, Ulrichs published, in various parts of Germany, a long series of works dealing with this question, and made various attempts to obtain a revision of the legal position of the sexual invert in Germany.

Although not a writer whose psychological views can carry much scientific weight, Ulrichs appears to have been a man of most brilliant ability, and his knowledge is said to have been of almost universal extent; he was not only well versed in his own special subjects of jurisprudence and theology, but in many branches of natural science, as well as in archeology; he was also regarded by many as the best Latinist of his time.  In 1880 he left Germany and settled in Naples, and afterward at Aquila in the Abruzzi, whence he issued a Latin periodical.  He died in 1895.[117] John Addington Symonds, who went to Aquila in 1891, wrote:  “Ulrichs is chrysostomos to the last degree, sweet, noble, a true gentleman and man of genius.  He must have been at one time a man of singular personal distinction, so finely cut are his features, and so grand the lines of his skull."[118]