ally. "While I take a lively interest in every kind
of intellectual work," he says, "it is only recently that I have
been attracted to real life and its requirements. I have never
had much skill in physical exercises. For external things until
recently I have only had contempt. I have a delicately
constituted nature, loving solitude, and only associating with a
few select persons. I have a decided taste for fiction, poetry
and music; my temperament is idealistic and religious, with
strict conceptions of duty and morality, and aspirations towards
the good and beautiful. I detest all that is common and coarse,
and yet I can think and act in the way you will learn from the
following pages."

Regarding his sexual life, X. made the following communication:
"During the last two years I have become convinced of the
perversion of my sexual instinct. I had often previously thought
that in me the impulse was not quite normal, but it is only
lately that I have become convinced of my complete perversion. I
have never read or heard of any case in which the sexual feelings
were of the same kind. Although I can feel a lively inclination
towards superior representatives of the female sex, and have
twice felt something like love, the sight or the recollection
even of a beautiful woman have never caused sexual excitement."
In the two exceptional instances mentioned it appears that X. had
an inclination to kiss the women in question, but that the
thought of coitus had no attraction. "In my voluptuous dreams,
connected with the emission of semen, women in seductive
situations have never appeared. I have never had any desire to
visit a _puella publica_. The love-stories of my fellow-students
seemed very silly, dances and balls were a horror to me, and only
on very rare occasions could I be persuaded to go into society.
It will be easy to guess the diagnosis in my case: I suffer from
the sexual attraction of my own sex, I am a lover of boys.

"You cannot imagine what a world of thoughts, wishes, feelings
and impulses the words 'knabe,' 'pais,' 'garcon,' 'boy,'
'ragazzo' have for me; one of these words, even in an unmeaning
clause of a translation-book, calls before me the whole sum of
associations which in course of time have become bound up with
this idea, and it is only with an effort that I