The old Greek and Roman statues, representing the gods and athletes of ancient Greece and Rome, are a puzzle to many, owing to the diminutive and phimosed virile organ that the artists have attached to them. Galen represents that the disuse of the organ by the athletes was the cause of its undeveloped form, and that as the organ of these did not figure in the worship of Venus, or participate in the festivals of Bacchus, but was used solely and simply for micturating purposes, impotence was often the result, citing the case of a patient who came to consult him for an obstinate priapism resulting from venereal excess, who met, in his anteroom, an athlete who was being treated for the opposite condition, due to the too rigid continence to which he had been for years subjected. Acton does not believe that continued continence has that effect, quoting Dr. Bergeret, who had long been physician to a number of religious societies, as saying that he had never seen serious troubles of the organs of generation in these communities, which denotes that if they indulged in proper fasting and prayer they were in the same condition of flaccid impotence as the athlete in Galen's anteroom. Louis VII, of France, tried fasting and prayer in connection with rigid continence, and, as a result, his wife, Queen Eleonore, was divorced from him and married Henry II, of England, who had not been continent. Hence, we see that the old sculptors, whether wishing to represent Jupiter or Plato, AEsculapius or Mars, a strongly knit and muscular frame was desired, an athlete, gladiator, or soldier being used as a model; the small, puerile, funnel-prepuced organ belonged to all these muscular or well-trained classes, was a natural appendage, as enforced continence and the most absolute chastity was the rule, to enforce which they even resorted to infibulation. This enforced continence often resulted in impotence, even before the prime of life was passed, accompanied by an inevitable atrophy of the male organ, with the resulting prepuce in the shape in which it is found in a boy of from eight to twelve years, precisely as they are found on the statues. How faithful the sculptors and artists were to nature and life in their representations can well be imagined by a critical examination of the Apollo Belvidere, where the difference of the scrotal position that exists between the right and left testicles is carried out to the minutest anatomical detail. In our age it is hard to conceive why their most masculine men should be deified, and all their gods represented as the most perfect of bodily development, while at the same time the finest physical specimens of manhood were doomed to a life of the most rigorous continence. It is also astonishing that all this should be done not from any principle or consideration of morality or virtue, but simply as a means subservient in producing at its maximum the highest degree of physical development and endurance. CHAPTER VI.