S.W. has never felt the slightest sexual attraction toward the opposite sex.  The first indications of inverted feeling were at the age of 6 or 7.  Watching his father’s pupils, boys of 13 or 14, from the windows, he speculated on what their organs of generation were like.  “In connection with a girl,” he writes, “I should no more have thought of such a thing than in the case of a block of marble.”  About this time, indeed, he at times slept with a sister of 10, who induced him to go through the form of sexual connection, saying that it felt “so funny;” but he merely did this to please her, and without the slightest interest or feeling on his own part.  This attitude became more marked with increased knowledge, until he fell ardently in love at the age of 12.  Throughout life he has practised masturbation to a certain extent, and is prepared to defend the practice in his own case.  His erotic dreams have been of only the vaguest and most shadowy character.  He is able to whistle.  He takes a warm interest in politics and in philanthropic work.  But his chief love is for music and he has published many musical compositions.  On the whole, and notwithstanding the persecution he has endured, he does not regard his life as unhappy.  At the same time he is keenly conscious of the atmosphere of “Pariahdom” which surrounds inverts, and in his own case this has never been alleviated by any sense of companionship in misery.  The facility with which some inverts are said to recognize others of their own kind is quite incomprehensible to him; he has never to his knowledge met one.

    HISTORY VI.—­E.S., physician, aged 50.

“I have some reason,” he writes, “for believing that some of my relatives (on the paternal side) were not normal in their sexual life.  But I am sure that no such suspicion was entertained by their friends or associates; they were very reticent people.  A great proportion of my near relatives have remained unmarried or deferred marriage until late in life.  None of them have been good business men; all seem to have been more deeply concerned in other things than in making—­or in keeping—­money.  They have mostly taken little or no share in public life, and not cared much for society.  Yet they have been folk of more than average ability, with intellectual and aesthetic interests.  We are prone to enthusiasms, but lack perseverance.  We are discursive and superficial, perhaps, but none would call us stupid.  We are perhaps abnormally self-centered and self-conscious—­never cruel or vicious.  Our powers of self-control are considerable; we are conventional people only because we are lazy and intensely dislike any open self-assertion.  Yet we are nervous rather than phlegmatic.  All that is on the father’s side.  My maternal ancestors have been concerned with farming and the sea and have also had a similar lack of business capacity, but with less mental adaptiveness and alertness, with more steadiness of