Those factors are discoverable in a large percentage of male persons. What seems unwarranted by facts is the suggestion that inherited neuropathy is an indispensable condition and the fundamental cause of homosexual instincts. The evidence of ancient Greece, schools, prisons, and sotadic races, compels us to believe that normally healthy people are often born with these instincts or else acquire them by the way of custom. Again, his insinuation that onanism, regarded as the main exciting cause, is more frequent among young people of abnormal inclinations than among their normal brethren, will not bear the test of common observation and of facts communicated in the autobiographies of professed onanists and confessed Urnings.
The problem is too delicate, too complicated, also too natural and simple, to be solved by hereditary disease and self-abuse. When we shift the ground of argument from acquired to inborn sexual inversion, its puzzling
was sensually very excitable and troubled with persistent erections." The fifth (p. 142) is not so clear; but it is obvious from his remarks that the first ejaculation of semen which happened to him did so at the sight of a handsome soldier: "feeling my parts moistened, I was horribly frightened and thought it was a hæmorrhage." Some of the cases do not mention the subject at all. A good many seem to have begun to masturbate early; but the proportion is not excessive to the whole number. One Urning explains the faute de mieux system (p. 115): "If we have no friend, whose sexual company has become needful to the preservation of our health, and if we abandon ourselves at last to masturbation alone with our imagination, then indeed do we become ill." Another speaks as follows (p. 151): "Homosexual indulgence with a man gave me enjoyment and a consequent feeling of well-being, whereas onanism faute de mieuxproduced an opposite result."
