act with his thigh excited me to the highest
degree." Ulrichs also relates that in his tenth year he conceived an
enthusiastic and romantic friendship for a boy two years his senior.

That experiences of the kind are very common, every one who has at all
conversed with Urnings knows well. From private sources of
unquestionable veracity, these may be added. _A_ relates that, before
eight years old, reverie occurred to him during the day, and dreams at
night, of naked sailors. When he began to study Latin and Greek, he
dreamed of young gods, and at the age of fourteen, became deeply
enamoured of the photograph of the Praxitelian Eros in the Vatican. He
had a great dislike for physical contact with girls; and with boys was
shy and reserved, indulging in no acts of sense. _B_ says that during
his tenderest boyhood, long before the age of puberty, he fell in love
with a young shepherd on one of his father's farms, for whom he was so
enthusiastic that the man had to be sent to a distant moor. _C_ at the
same early age, conceived a violent affection for a footman; _D_ for an
officer, who came to stay at his home; _E_ for the bridegroom of his
eldest sister.

In nearly all the cases here cited, the inverted sexual instinct sprang
up spontaneously. Only a few of the autobiographies record seduction by
an elder man as the origin of the affection. In none of them was it ever
wholly overcome. Only five out of the twenty-seven men married. Twenty
declare that, tortured by the sense of their dissimilarity to other
males, haunted by shame and fear, they forced themselves to frequent
public women soon after the age of puberty. Some found themselves
impotent. Others succeeded in accomplishing their object with
difficulty, or by means of evoking the images of men on whom their
affections were set. All, except one, concur in emphatically asserting
the superior attraction which men have always exercised for them over
women. Women leave them, if not altogether disgusted, yet cold and
indifferent. Men rouse their strongest sympathies and instincts. The one
exception just alluded to is what Ulrichs would call an Uranodioning.
The others are capable of friendship with women, some even of aesthetic
admiration, and the tenderest regard for them, but not of genuine sexual
desire. Their case is literally an inversion of the ordinary.

Some observations may be made on Ulrichs' theory. It is now recognised
by the leading authorities, medical and m