he 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