ety
alone can ever suffice to produce homosexuality. Naecke was
careful to set aside the cases, to which much significance was
once attached, in which old men with failing sexual powers, or
younger men exhausted by heterosexual debauchery, are attracted
to boys. In such cases, which include the majority of those
appearing late, Naecke regarded the inversion as merely spurious,
the _faute de mieux_ of persons no longer apt for normal sexual
activity.

Such cases no doubt need more careful psychological study than
they usually receive. Fere once investigated a case of this kind
in which a healthy young man (though with slightly neurotic
heredity on one side) practised sexual intercourse excessively
between the ages of 20 and 23--often impelled more by _amour
propre_ (or what Adler would term the "masculine protest" of the
organically inferior) than sexual desire--and then suddenly
became impotent, at the same time losing all desire, but without
any other loss of health. Six months later potency slowly
returned, though never to the same extent, and he married. At the
age of 35 symptoms of locomotor ataxia began to appear, and some
years later he again became impotent, but without losing sexual
desire. Suddenly one day, on sitting in close contact with a
young man at a _table d'hote_, he experienced a violent erection;
he afterward found that the same thing occurred with other young
men, and, though he had no psychic desire for men, he was
constrained to seek such contact, and a repugnance for women and
their sexuality arose. Five months later a complete paraplegic
impotence set in; and then both the homosexual tendency and the
aversion to women disappeared. (Fere, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, p.
184.) In such a case, under the influence of disease, excessive
stimulation seems to result in more or less complete sexual
anesthesia, just as temporarily we may be more or less blinded by
excess of light; and functional power reasserts itself under the
influence of a different and normally much weaker stimulus.

Leppmann, who has studied the homosexual manifestations of
previously normal old men toward boys ("Greisenalter und
Kriminalitaet," _Zeitschrift fuer Psychotherapie_, Bd. i, Heft 4,
1909), considers the chief factor to be a flaring up of the
sexual impulse in a perverted direct