n childhood to
youth, thence into what it does in our prime, and we have seen how, when
we are on the down grade, owing to the increase of years, then, like the
minute-men of Concord, wakened up by Paul Revere's classic ride, hanging
on to the rear of the retreating and disheartened British, it harasses,
worries, and downs a man here and there, striking down the man as if it
had some undying, irremediable spite, which nothing but his misery and
death could alleviate. Some authorities will argue that all that is
required is cleanliness; that all men need do is to be like a true
American, with the old Continental watchword of "eternal vigilance is
the price of liberty" in continued active practice. A bowlful of some
antiseptic wash and a small sponge should always be at hand, and he
should be as industrious as if haltered in a tread-mill; he should make
this a part of his toilet, and his daily and hourly care. This will, we
are told, lessen his chances of becoming a victim to the many ills that
lie in wait for him, all on account of the glory, honor, and comfort of
wearing a prepuce, which is a perfectly physiological appendage.

From these visible and apparently easily understood conditions and
results we are now to enter a broad field, wherein the prepuce seems to
exercise a malign influence in the most distant and apparently
unconnected manner; where, like some of the evil genii or sprites in
the Arabian tales, it can reach from afar the object of its malignity,
striking him down unawares in the most unaccountable manner; making him
a victim to all manner of ills, sufferings, and tribulations; unfitting
him for marriage or the cares of business; making him miserable and an
object of continual scolding and punishment in childhood, through its
worriments and nocturnal enuresis; later on, beginning to affect him
with all kinds of physical distortions and ailments, nocturnal
pollutions, and other conditions calculated to weaken him physically,
mentally, and morally; to land him, perchance, in the jail, or even in a
lunatic asylum. Man's whole life is subject to the capricious
dispensations and whims of this Job's-comforts-dispensing enemy of man.

As strange as it may seem, this field of knowledge, this field of misery
and suffering, disease and distortion, of physical and mental obliquity,
presided over by this preputial Afrit of malignant disposition, was an
unknown, undiscovered, and therefore unexplored region for some