law of sexual attraction, but is merely a special case of it. An individual who is half-man, half-woman, requires as sexual complement a being similarly equipped with a share of both sexes in order to fulfil the requirements of the law. This explains the fact that sexual inverts usually associate only with persons of similar character, and rarely admit to intimacy those who are normal. The sexual attraction is mutual, and this explains why sexual inverts so readily recognise each other. This being so, the normal element in human society has very little idea of the extent to which homo-sexuality is practised, and when a case becomes public property, every normal young profligate thinks that he has a right to condemn such "atrocities." So recently as the year 1900 a professor of psychiatry in a German university urged that those who practised homo-sexuality should be castrated.
The therapeutical remedies which have been used to combat homo-sexuality, in cases where such treatment has been attempted, are certainly less radical than the advice of the professor; but they serve to show only how little the nature of homo-sexuality was understood. The method used at present is hypnotism, and this can rest only on the theory that homo-sexuality is an acquired character. By suggesting the idea of the female form and of normal congress, it is sought to accustom those under treatment to normal relations. But the acknowledged results are very few.
The failure is to be expected from our standpoint. The hypnotiser suggests to the subject the image of a "typical" woman, ignorant of the innate differences in the subject and unaware that such a type is naturally repulsive to him. And as the normal typical woman is not his complement, it is fruitless of the doctor to advise the services of any casual Venus, however attractive, to complete the cure of a man who has long shunned normal intercourse. If our formula were used to discover the complement of the male invert, it would point to the most man-like woman, the Lesbian or Sapphist type. Probably such is the only type of woman who would attract the sexual invert or please him. If a
