it is not uncommon to have
such cases apply for assistance after they have in vain tried to dilate
the constricting preputial orifice. In the early writings of the Greeks,
it is mentioned that among the Egyptians circumcision exempted them from
a certain form of disease that affected the penis. Philon mentions
particularly the immunity that the operation conferred against a species
of affection which Michel Levy asserts to have been a gangrenous
disease. So that, outside of any religious significance, there is no
doubt that, in individual cases, circumcision has more than once been
suggested, although it cannot be said that such individual cases would
ever, or could, lead to its becoming a national or racial, much less a
sectarian, rite.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE PREPUCE AS AN OUTLAW, AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE GLANS.

Ricord has well termed this appendage to civilized man "a useless bit of
flesh." Times were, however, when--man living in a wild state, and when
in imitation of some of our near relatives with tails and hairy bodies;
when he still found locomotion on all-fours handier than on his two
feet; when in pursuit of either the juicy grasshopper or other small
game, or of the female of his own species to gratify his lust, or in the
frantic rush to escape the clutches, fangs, or claws of a pursuing
enemy, he was obliged to fly and leap over thorny briars and
bramble-bushes or hornets' nests, or plunge through swamps alive with
blood-sucking insects and leeches--Ricord's definition would certainly
have been inapplicable. In those days, but for the protecting double
fold of the preputial envelope that protected it from the thorns and
cutting grasses, the coarse bark of trees, or the stings and bites of
insects, the glans penis of primitive man would have often looked like
the head of the proverbially duel-disfigured German university student,
or the Bacchus-worshiping nose of a jolly British Boniface. So that in
those days, unless primitive man was intended to have an organ that
resembled a battle-scarred Roman legionary, a prepuce was an absolute
necessity.

With improvement in man's condition and his gradual evolution into a
higher sphere, the assumption of the erect posture, and the great stride
in civilization that originated the invention of the manufacture of the
perineal band, which not only protected the glans in its thorny passage
through life, but also acted like a protecting aegis to the scrotum and
it