In many cases its tightness prevents the escape of the sebaceous matter that collects in the sulcus back of the corona, and the resulting irritation on the surface of the glans and the inner mucous fold of the prepuce ends in an inflammatory thickening of the latter, its inner surface becoming thick, undilatable, hard, and unyielding, all the natural elasticity that should be present having departed, with more or less inflammatory thickening and adhesions between the two layers of skin that form the prepuce. In this unyielding tube the glans is imprisoned and compressed, often suffering the tortures that the "maiden" of the dungeons of the Inquisition inflicted on the unhappy heretics. It becomes elongated, cyanosed, and hyperaesthetic; the meatus of the urethra is congested and hypertrophied, the corona is undeveloped and often absent, the glans having, on the whole, the long-nosed, conical appearance of the head of a field-mouse. There are hardly five per cent. of the uncircumcised but who suffer in some degree from this constricting result of the prepuce, 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.