tent organic bisexuality in
each sex. At an early stage of development the sexes are
indistinguishable, and throughout life the traces of this early community
of sex remain. The hen fowl retains in a rudimentary form the spurs which
are so large and formidable in her lord, and sometimes she develops a
capacity to crow, or puts on male plumage. Among mammals the male
possesses useless nipples, which occasionally even develop into breasts,
and the female possesses a clitoris, which is merely a rudimentary penis,
and may also develop. The sexually inverted person does not usually
possess any gross exaggeration of these signs of community with the
opposite sex. But, as we have seen, there are a considerable number of
more subtle approximations to the opposite sex in inverted persons, both
on the physical and the psychic side. Putting the matter in a purely
speculative shape, it may be said that at conception the organism is
provided with about 50 per cent. of male germs and about 50 per cent. of
female germs, and that, as development proceeds, either the male or the
female germs assume the upper hand, until in the maturely developed
individual only a few aborted germs of the opposite sex are left. In the
homosexual, however, and in the bisexual, we may imagine that the process
has not proceeded normally, on account of some peculiarity in the number
or character of either the original male germs or female germs, or both,
the result being that we have a person who is organically twisted into a
shape that is more fitted for the exercise of the inverted than of the
normal sexual impulse, or else equally fitted for both.[233]

The conception of the latent bisexuality of all males and females
cannot fail to be fairly obvious to intelligent observers of the
human body. It emerges at an early period in the history of
philosophic thought, and from the first was occasionally used for
the explanation of homosexuality. Plato's myth in the _Banquet_
and the hermaphroditic statues of antiquity show how acute minds,
working ahead of science, exercised themselves with these
problems. (For a fully illustrated study of the ancient
conception of hermaphroditism in sculpture see L.S.A.M. von
Roemer, "Ueber die Androgynische Idee des Lebens," _Jahrbuch fuer
sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, vol. v, 1903, pp. 711-939.) Parmenides,
following Alcmaeon, the philosophic physician who discovered that
the br