marked among a considerable
minority. One of my correspondents, M.N., writes to me: "With regard to
the general inability of inverts to whistle (I am not able to do so
myself), their fondness for green (my favorite color), their feminine
caligraphy, skill at female occupations, etc., these all seem to me but
indications of the one principle. To go still farther and include trivial
things, few inverts even smoke in the same manner and with the same
enjoyment as a man; they have seldom the male facility at games, cannot
throw at a mark with precision, or even spit!"

Nearly all these peculiarities indicate a minor degree of nervous
disturbance and lead to modification, as my correspondent points out, in a
feminine direction. It is scarcely necessary to add that they by no means
necessarily imply inversion. Shelley, for instance, was unable to whistle,
though he never gave an indication of inversion; but he was a person of
somewhat abnormal and feminine organization, and he illustrates the
tendency of these apparently very insignificant functional anomalies to be
correlated with other and more important psychic anomalies.

The greater part of these various anatomical peculiarities and functional
anomalies point, more or less clearly, to the prevalence among inverts of
a tendency to infantilism, combined with feminism in men and masculinism
in women.[218] This tendency is denied by Hirschfeld, but it is often
well indicated among the subjects whose histories I have been able to
present, and is indeed suggested by Hirschfeld's own elaborate results; so
that it can scarcely be passed over. I regard it as highly significant,
and it is in harmony with all that we are learning to know regarding the
important part played by the internal secretions, alike in inversion and
the general bodily modifications in an infantile, feminine, and masculine
direction.

If we are justified in believing that there is a tendency for inverted
persons to be somewhat arrested in development, approaching the child
type, we may connect this fact with the sexual precocity sometimes marked
in inverts, for precocity is commonly accompanied by rapid arrest of
development.

A correspondent, who is himself inverted, furnishes the following
notes of cases he is well acquainted with; I quote them here, as
they illustrate the anomalies commonly found:--

1. A., male, eldest child of typically neurotic family. Three
children in all: 2 m