ability of
the uncircumcised races dwelling in the temperate and semi-tropical
countries to cancer, gangrene, and elephantiasis might well lead one to
ask: Why are we afflicted with a prepuce? We can understand how a man
may become gouty, and become a subject in the end for a gangrene of the
extremities; or how senile gangrene may, through a series of
pathological processes and blood changes, with the aid of age, finally
be reached; or how, by a like course of diseased processes, we reach the
apoplectic stage. These conditions, however, can be put off, or partly,
if not wholly avoided, by a proper course of life, and, at the worst,
it is only after the fires of our youth and prime have completely burned
out, that these conditions are liable to claim us as their lawful
victim. Not so, however, with some of these conditions that may end in
penile gangrene; that are liable to pounce upon us unawares, like an
Apache in an Arizona canyon; or as the hired mercenaries of old Canon
Fulbert did upon poor Abelard in his study, and, without further ado or
ceremony emasculate man as effectually as the most exacting Turk could
demand, with a veritable _taille a fleur de ventre_ operation.

Nature has her own ways of protecting what there is of any utility;
there is a law of the survival of the fittest that we all appreciate.
If, then, this penile appendage is of any utility, why is it that,
unlike the rest of the body, it falls such an easy victim to gangrene?
The procreative function seems to be, in a sense, one of the main cares
of nature in its relation to the animal as well as the vegetable
kingdom; but here is a useless bit of skin, adipose tissue, mucous
membrane, and some connective tissue, that on the least provocation is
liable to go off into a gangrene and drag one of the main generative, or
even all the procreative, apparatus into the general wreck. Nature
certainly never intended anything of the kind. To be generous, and not
libel nature, we must conclude that the prepuce is a near relative to
the fast-disappearing climbing-muscle; very useful in our primitive,
arboreal days, when we needed such a muscle to reach our perch for the
night, and a prepuce or something of the kind, in default of a
breech-cloth, to protect the glans penis from being scratched by the
briars or thorny and rough bark of the trees in our ascent. The prepuce
was well enough in our primitive and arboreal days,--ages and ages ahead
of our cave and la