This book, from a subjective and scarcely scientific standpoint, claims that homosexual relationships are natural, necessary, and legitimate.[123] In England the first attempts to deal seriously, from the modern point of view, with the problem of homosexuality came late, and were either published privately or abroad.

In 1883 John Addington Symonds privately printed his discussion of _paiderastia_ in ancient Greece, under the title of _A Problem in Greek Ethics_, and in 1889-1890 he further wrote, and in 1891 privately printed, _A Problem of Modern Ethics: Being an Enquiry into the Phenomena of Sexual Inversion_.

In 1886 Sir Richard Burton added to his translation of the _Arabian Nights_ a Terminal Essay on the same subject.

In 1894 Edward Carpenter privately printed in Manchester a pamphlet entitled _Homogenic Love_, in which he criticised various psychiatric views of inversion at that time current, and claimed that the laws of homosexual love are the same as those of heterosexual love, urging, however, that the former possesses a special aptitude to be exalted to a higher and more spiritual level of comradeship, so fulfilling a beneficent social function.

More recently (1907) Edward Carpenter published a volume of papers on homosexuality and its problems, under the title of _The Intermediate Sex_, and later (1914) a more special study of the invert in early religion and in warfare, _Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk_.
In 1896 the most comprehensive book so far written on the subject in England was published in French by Mr.Andre Raffalovich (in Lacassagne's _Bibliotheque de Criminologie_), _Uranisme et Unisexualite_.