the highly irritable and sensitive nervous system of the child by the titillation in its movements on the glans; if too tight and constricted, then it compresses the glans, and by its irritation it leads the child to seize the organ."[93] So that in either case he looks upon the prepuce, through the sensitiveness it retains and induces in the glans, as the principle cause of masturbation. M. Debreyne, the Trappist monk and physician of La Trappe, who has paid considerable attention to medicine as applied to morality, practically makes the same observations. In children who have not yet the suggestions of sexual desire imparted by the presence of the spermatic fluid, the presence of the prepuce seems to anticipate those promptings. Circumcised boys may, in individual cases, either through precept or example, physical or mental imperfection, be found to practice onanism, but in general the practice can be asserted as being very rare among the children of circumcised races, showing the less irritability of the organs in the class; neither in infancy are they as liable to priapism during sleep as those that are uncircumcised. Dr. Bernheim says that "the prepuce may be said in general to be an appendage to man, if not positively harmful in some cases, at least useless, requiring constant care, the neglect of which is liable to entail disease and suffering; the irritation it produces through the sebaceous secretion is a frequent cause of masturbation which nothing short of circumcision will remedy." Through middle life, unless the prepuce be the subject of some vicious conformation, little inconvenience may result from its presence, except it be from the dangers to infections already pointed out during this period of life; an ordinarily movable and retractable prepuce will not acquire the condition of phimosis, unless it be through disease or accident; but with our entrance into old age, or after having passed our vigorous prime, the torment of the days of our infancy and childhood come to harass us again. Persons given to corpulency, with a long prepuce, are apt to become affected with phimosis in their latter years, as such persons are more subject to loss of their sexual vigor and power of erection than lean and spare people; in these, the gradual diminution of the size of the erectile tissues of the organ and its retraction allows of the reconstriction of the preputial opening, which, in the end, will not allow the prepuce to be drawn back over the gland. These conditions are followed by the irritating affections incident to phimosis of our earlier life, with the modification that age has induced in making us subject to more serious and fatal ailments, both locally and generally. CHAPTER XX. THE PREPUCE, PHIMOSIS, AND CANCER.