to a greater or less extent.

On the other hand, the unconstricted glans penis assumes the shape and
appearance that is seen in the circumcised. The head is shorter, the
face flat and abrupt, and the meatus, instead of being at the end of a
conical point, is situated on the smooth, rounded front of the glans,
and does not differ in color from the covering of the glans itself. From
the superior commissure of the meatus to the sulcus in the rear of the
corona its topographical outline may be said to describe two opposite
segments of a circle, as seen in the cuts representing the glans in its
natural shape. The corona is prominent and well developed.

The opponents of circumcision base much of their opposition to the fact
that circumcision interferes with the natural condition of the parts.
The question may well be asked, which of these two shaped glans is the
natural product as nature intended it should be? It is a well-known fact
that the most forlorn and mouse-headed, long-nosed glans penis will,
within a week or two after its liberation from its fetters of preputial
bands, assume its true shape. We may naturally inquire if nature made
the glans of a certain shape, which seems to be the proper shape for
copulative purposes, only to have the condition most effectually
abolished by a constricting, unnatural band? How much the shape of this
glans, from meatus to corona, may have to do with retaining the urethra
to a healthy and normal calibre and condition has not been inquired
into, but, as far as the writer has observed, a normal glans seems to
have less abnormalities of the urethra, and in treating such cases he
has always found that when the urethra of one of these normal-glans
subjects was affected it was far easier to manage; on the other hand,
secondary and even a tertiary recurrence to an operation is often the
fate of a long, narrow, conical-pointed penis.

Phimosis is known to have been a cause of male impotence by its direct
interference with the outward flow of the seminal fluid; but, although
we have cases where impregnation has taken place by the aid of a warm
spoon and a warm syringe, as in the case related in a former chapter, it
must be admitted that the corona is not without some functional office
in the act of procreation. Its shape indicates a valve action like that
of the valve in a syringe-piston, and if we examine the two extremes of
these conditions of glans--one devoid of corona, as many are, and