d the images with which
they are associated do not offer compensation for the normal
excitation of the sexual appetite, or only do so insufficiently.

I am here obliged to contradict Krafft-Ebing, who regards
exhibitionism as the effect of the impotence of certain individuals
depraved by excesses, or as the unconscious act of certain epileptics.
No doubt the two conditions which he mentions may present themselves,
but the exhibitionists I have observed have all been psychopaths whose
perversion was primordial and hereditary, with the exception of some
females in whom perversion originated in suggestion or alcoholism,
which had at any rate aroused the disposition.

Lesbian love merits special mention. Owing to the clitoris being more
or less concealed, women are often not satisfied by coitus, especially
when the ejaculation of the male takes place too quickly. Consequently
a number of normal women prefer to procure an orgasm by means of
lesbian love (_cunnilingus_.) There are clubs of female perverts, many
of whom are not homosexual by heredity.

Although they differ from hereditary perversions, acquired perversions
are connected with the former by a series of latent hereditary
dispositions, more or less marked, and often difficult to distinguish
in particular cases, especially when suggestion is blended with them.

Among the entirely hereditary and congenital sexual perversions, many
occur in individuals who are well conducted and often possessed of
delicate and altruistic sentiments. This point is not sufficiently
recognized. Such persons are nearly always more or less neurotic in
other respects. They are disheartened by their perversion and are so
much ashamed of it that they often prefer to carry their secret to the
grave rather than confide it to their doctor.

Others sometimes confess to a doctor, and the life of a martyr, who
is always contemplating suicide, is revealed to him. Individuals of
feeble, cynical, egoistic or abnormal natures, whose number is legion
in the corrupt centers of modern civilization, yield to their
perversion and often come before the tribunals, or else become objects
of public contempt. As it is this class which generally become known,
it is assumed by too hasty generalization that sexual perverts are
necessarily cynical, vicious or weak-minded individuals; but this
induction is false. It is unfortunately impossible to estimate the
number of sexual perversions dissimulated by a large