A calm, unprejudiced consideration of the subject of the liability 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 lake dwellings,--when the notch in a tree and its rough bark formed our couch; but in these days of plush-cushioned pews and opera-seats, cosy office-chairs, car-seats, and upholstered furniture or polished-oak seats, it serves no intelligent purpose.