We even find in Lucian's works a passage indicating that some of the Greeks felt at the thought of female homosexualism the repugnance which we feel at the thought of male homosexualism. =The Tide Turns.= About the third century and until the eighteenth, the tide turned, at least in the Western world, and homosexualism found itself confronted by a barrier of penalties which in certain lands included capital punishment. After the French revolution such extreme penalties were abandoned in several European countries. At present, death is no longer the wages of the homosexual sin, but jail sentences and ostracism of the most severe sort punish the sinner when detected. Legally, then, homosexualism is considered as a voluntary "perversion," to be punished, not as an abnormality, to be treated or accepted. This position is absolutely ridiculous and goes counter to every possible scientific view of homosexualism, its nature and its genesis. Whether psychiatrists consider sexualism from a "purely physical" point of view or from a "purely psychic" point of view, they all consider it, not as a matter of free choice, but as a compulsion, an organic compulsion according to the first view, an unconscious mental compulsion according to the latter. Opprobrium and punishment constitute no solution for any compulsion, be it physical or mental. =Many Theories= have been advanced as to the genesis of homosexualism and most of them are very unsatisfactory because every one of them generally excludes the others and because they attempt one thing which cannot be done: to found homosexualism either on a purely physical or on a purely mental basis. We can never understand homosexualism until we consider it from an organic point of view, according to which mental states are neither the cause nor the result of physical states, or vice versa, but mental and physical states are two aspects of the organism, of the personality. The first hypothesis I intend to review is that of the Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld which has had more influence on modern thought than any other theory of homosexualism and which unfortunately has been accepted as gospel truth by many homosexuals. =The Third Sex.= Hirschfeld reminds us in his book "Intermediate Sexual Stages" that during the first eight weeks of its existence, the fetus is neither male nor female. It is only about the eighth week that a differentiation takes place and that the sex of the unborn can be determined. A thousand physical influences may be at work in fetal life which may cause underdevelopment of the male fetus' organs, which then may resemble a female's in many particulars, or the overdevelopment of a female's clitoris which may make it slightly similar to a man's penis. Thousands of variations can be observed which, in certain cases, have caused the attending physician to declare the child's sex as "doubtful."