The artistic instinct—the poetic temperament, “sentimentality” in its highest sense—goes hand in hand with a rounding-off of the sharp corners of masculinity. Artistic or poetic decades have been conspicuous because of a semi-slumbering of fundamental masculine traits, that is, the instinctive relish for wrangling and war. The sterner sex has temporarily laid aside its primal _fighting_ function ordained by Nature and become to some degree effeminate. As a rule, abstract beauty’s devotees—“æsthetes” in the highest sense, that is: poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, and superior musicians—have been characterized by more or less effeminacy. They have been particularly prone to homosexuality. While among full-fledged males, the proportion that has achieved proficiency in one of the fine arts is something like one in a thousand, among androgynes (the two varieties combined), it has been one in about twenty. I will later point out that the pinnacle in poetry, sculpture, and painting has been achieved by androgynes. [Sidenote: _Apollo._] But the feminesque Apollo was the god not only of beauty, but of _adolescence_—the period of life during which human beauty is at its culmination. He possessed eternal youth. He is even referred to as “the boy god.” Adoration of him sprang out of man’s delight in the semi-womansouled and quasi-womanbodied stripling just before arrival at puberty. And ultra-androgynes remain—to a large extent—in that pre-puberty period down to thirty-five. Their development has been arrested. Full-fledged male associates absolutely ignorant of the existence of androgynism have described—in the author’s hearing—androgynes even close to fifty years old as “still mere boys.” But an adolescent androgyne or boy god was also worshipped by the Semite nations (other than the Jews) under the name Ablu, and by the Celts under the name Maponus. Philologists will recognize that “Apollo,” “Ablu,” “Maponus,” and “boy” are descended from the same vocable in the language used by the Asiatic tribe from which most of the civilized nations of the ancient and modern world derive. _B_ is only a strengthened _p_; the liquid _l_ has often been transmuted into the kindred _n_; and the diphthong _oy_ indicates the elision of a liquid. We have here etymological evidence that an adolescent-androgyne deity was worshipped before the dawn of history. To-day, among some primitive races, as the aborigines of America, androgynes are the central feature of the most sacred rites. [Sidenote: _Hermaphroditos and Ganymede._]