God is plainly declared, in Exodus xv. 26, to send diseases upon men as a punishment for the breach of His commandments, and this has been adduced to show that the Jews traced their maladies to the anger of an offended Deity; and thus it has been argued that their etiology of disease was not higher than that of the other nations. But this argument is unfair. The Mosaic law was to a great extent a sanitary code, and even in the light of modern science we are compelled to admire the wisdom of the laws which have for so many centuries made the Jews the healthiest and most macrobiotic of peoples. The rite of circumcision was not peculiar to the Jews; and just as baptism was an initiatory rite borrowed from another religion, yet made distinctive of Christianity, so circumcision has come to be considered a peculiarly Jewish practice. It may have been with the Israelites a protest against the phallus worship which is of such remote antiquity, and which was the foundation of the myth of Osiris. Wunderbar[174] asserts that it distinctly contributed to increase the fruitfulness of the race and to check inordinate desires in the individual. There are excellent surgical reasons for both these suppositions, in addition to which we may add that it contributed to cleanliness and prevented irritation. Wunderbar, moreover, seems to have established his statement that after circumcision there is less probability of the absorption of syphilitic virus, and he has instanced the fact that such specific disease is less frequent with Jewish than with Christian populations.[175] “Circumcision,” says Pickering, speaking of the Polynesian practice, “was now explained; and various other customs, which had previously appeared unaccountable, were found to rest on physical causes, having been extended abroad by the process of imitation.”[176] The same writer states that the practice is “common to the ancient inhabitants of the Thebaid, and also to the modern Abyssinians and their neighbours in the South.”[177] Ewald[178] says that circumcision was practised by various Arabian tribes, in Africa, amongst Ethiopic Christians and the negroes of the Congo. It was also practised on girls by Lydian, Arabian, and African tribes, as Philo and Strabo inform us. Ewald considers it originated as an offering of one’s own flesh and blood in sacrifice to God, and may have been considered as a substitute for the whole body of a human being. Circumcision is practised amongst Australian savages on the Murray River, as also another incredible ceremonial, as Lubbock terms it.[179] Castration is hinted at in Matthew xix. 12 as an operation well understood. In hot climates extra precautions for cleanliness have to be adopted beyond those which would amply suffice in northern lands. Captain Burton says:[180]—