rements of the law; the operation seems to be invested with some
civil or religious significance, as a palisade or stockade of trees is
placed around the place where it is performed. A native, aged about
twenty years, informed Lumholtz that the operation was performed because
the blacks did not like to hear the children cry about the camp, and,
further, that they were not desirous of having many children; this
native had not yet become a father and had not yet been subjected to the
operation. The natives were observed to be fat and in good physical
condition.

There is something mysterious in this operation. It can easily be
conceived how circumcision might at times have been suggested by its
spontaneous and natural performance without any assistance from man.
Cullerier reports one case of partial circumcision through the means of
an accident happening to a painter. The man was at work on a ladder,
with a small bucket of paint hooked into one of the rounds above him;
through some means the bucket lost its hold and in falling struck the
penis on its dorsum with such force that the prepuce was cut through on
a parallel with the corona of the glans for fully two-thirds of its
circumference, the glans slipping through the opening and gathering in a
fleshy bunch underneath the frenum. This man carried this abnormality
for some years, when, desiring to marry and seeing that this appendage
would be as much of an impediment as one of the huge rings worn by the
Hindoo devotee, he applied to Cullevier for advice, who promptly removed
it with the knife.[25] The writer has seen three cases, during his
practice, of spontaneous circumcision, all resulting from phymosis as a
secondary affection to venereal disease. The first case occurred when he
first entered into practice; it was in a young, stout, and full-blooded
man with a violent gonorrhoea. There was much swelling and tumefaction
of the whole organ, which seemed to be very rebellious to all treatment.
At one of his morning visits he was horrified to observe a transverse,
livid mark at what seemed to be the middle of the organ; by noon this
had gained ground to the right and left and there was no mistaking that
it meant nothing less than mortification. Never having seen a case, the
natural uncomfortable conclusion was that, through some cause or other
or the natural result of excessive congestion, the man was about to lose
one-half of his organ; and Burnside at Fredericksburg was