It has already been suggested that the prepuce does not at all ages bear the same analogous relation to man. In childhood, especially during our earliest years, it is out of all proportion in size when compared to the rest of the organ, or to any use it may have placed to its credit. Man does not, then, certainly need that refinement of nervous sensitiveness in the corona that is useful in after life in inducing the flow or ejaculation of the seminal fluid; neither is there at that age much of a corona to protect. In middle life, or what might be called the procreative period of man, when the corona would seem to require all its excitability or sensitiveness, seems to be the very season in life when the glans is most apt to remain uncovered; so that nature and this hypothetical idea of the use of the prepuce are evidently at variance. So we go through childhood with this long funnel-shaped appendage into manhood, when the increasing size of the body of the penis restores a sort of equilibrium between the size and bulk of the organ and its integumentary covering. At this period, as we have seen, although it does not, from the equilibrium restored, and the more or less use to which it is subjected, induce any great immediate or uncomplicated troubles, it nevertheless endangers the existence of the penis through the accidental course of some putrid or continued fever, or it subjects man to the manifold dangers of venereal or tubercular infections. In advanced age, owing to the diminution in size of the organ, the prepuce resumes the proportionate bulky dimensions of childhood, and as the organ recedes and becomes more and more diminutive, the prepuce again, like in childhood, begins to tend to phimosis; the urine of the aged is also more irritating and prone to decomposition or putrefaction, and the constant state of moisture that the preputial canal of the aged is necessarily kept in, either by frequent urination or the incomplete emptying of the urethra that is peculiar to old age, and which results in more or less dribbling, is a powerful factor in inducing the many attacks of posthitis and balanitis, as well as those attacks of excoriation and eczema which are so annoying to the aged. I have often seen such cases happening to men past fifty, who, being widowers, and never having had anything of the kind, as well as being in the most complete ignorance of the nature of the disease, have, from delicacy and fear that the disease might induce some suspicions as to their conduct in the minds of those whose good opinions they value above all else, gone on suffering untold miseries, especially if the urine were in the least diabetic.