women is too vague to serve as the foundation of any satisfactory theory. What is wanted is some principle which would enable us to determine at what point between male and female such individuals were placed. My law of sexual affinity is such a principle. Its application to the facts of homo-sexuality showed that the woman who attracts and is attracted by other women is herself half male. Interpreting the historical evidence at our disposal in the light of this principle, we find that the degree of emancipation and the proportion of maleness in the composition of a woman are practically identical. Sappho was only the forerunner of a long line of famous women who were either homo-sexually or bisexually inclined. Classical scholars have defended Sappho warmly against the implication that there was anything more than mere friendship in her relations with her own sex, as if the accusation were necessarily degrading. In the second part of my book, however, I shall show reasons in favour of the possibility that homo-sexuality is a higher form than hetero-sexuality. For the present, it is enough to say that homo-sexuality in a woman is the outcome of her masculinity and presupposes a higher degree of development. Catherine II. of Russia, and Queen Christina of Sweden, the highly gifted although deaf, dumb and blind, Laura Bridgman, George Sand, and a very large number of highly gifted women and girls concerning whom I myself have been able to collect information, were partly bisexual, partly homo-sexual.
I shall now turn to other indications in the case of the large number of emancipated women regarding whom there is no evidence as to homo-sexuality, and I shall show that my attribution of maleness is no caprice, no egotistical wish of a man to associate all the higher manifestations of intelligence with the male sex. Just as homo-sexual or bisexual women reveal their maleness by their preference either for women or for womanish men, so hetero-sexual women display maleness in their choice of a male partner who is not preponderatingly male. The most famous of George Sand's many affairs were those with de Musset, the most effeminate
