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and its contents, the prepuce became a superfluity; not only a superfluity, but, now that its natural office had been replaced by the perineal cloth, it actually began to be a nuisance, as its former free contact with the air had retained it in a state of vigorous and disease-resisting health which was now fast departing. As Montesquieu observes, in the causes that led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, those seasons of trials, tribulations, and struggle for existence are those of health and progress and healthy life, and the periods of luxury and idleness are those of degeneracy and decay. So with the prepuce, the luxury and idleness, voluptuousness and consequent feasting incident to its being supplanted in its original functions by the perineal cloth, which left it thenceforth unemployed, led it in the pathway of disease and death. This first innovation in civilization was to the prepuce the beginning of its decay and fall. Like Belshazzar in his great banquet-hall in ancient Babylon, the prepuce might have read the hand-writing on the wall, "_Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin_," and foreseen the gory end that awaited it. Like to other human affairs, however, even in his fallen estate a kind word can be said for the prepuce. Puzey, of Liverpool, has found it of extreme value, and even