Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/57



The distinctly individual and biographic contents of this study will be regarded by the less philosophic with more interest than these preliminary analyses of various aspects of similisexual passion. But only through these considerations can one enter with full intelligence on the narratives and other clinical memoranda of Uranian and Uraniad types.

When we look into sexualism in the brute-world we soon discern that nothing could be more the misuse of a term than to speak of similisexual passion as "against nature", an an "unnatural" impulse, and so on. Everyday observation, wherever wild animals or tame are to be watched, convinces us of the in-rooted propensity. The entire chain of beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, and rather in proportion to advances in fineness of nervous organism, practice similisexual habits, by inborn impulses and deliberate choice. By an odd contradiction of phrase, the tendency is called both an "unnatural" and a "bestial" one, In the mammals, the horse, the dog, the camel, the ass, the elephant, all members of the ursine, lupine, bovine and rodent families, the larger and the smaller felidae, and in particular the ape and monkey, entire genera are given to it. In Dr. Garnier's interesting work on Onanism he gives many