tions--had provided
him with a sheath or prepuce, wherein he carried his procreative organ
safely out of harm's way, in wild steeple-chases through thorny briars
and bramble-brakes, or, when hardly pushed, and not able to climb
quickly a tree of his own choice, he was by circumstances forced up the
sides of some rough-barked or thorny tree. This leathery pouch also
protected him from the many leeches, small aquatic lizards, or other
animals that infested the marshes or rivers through which he had at
times to wade or swim; or served as a protection from the bites of ants
or other vermin when, tired, he rested on his haunches on some mossy
bank or sand-hill.

Man has now no use for any of these necessaries of a long-past age,--an
age so remote that the speculations of Ernest Renan regarding the
differences between the Semitic race of Shem and the idolatrous
descendants of Ham, away off in the far mountains and valleys of Asia
lying between the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates, seem more as if
he were discussing an event of yesterday than something which is
considered contemporary with our earlier history,--and we find them
disappearing, disuse gradually producing an obliteration of this tissue
in some cases, and the modifying influence of evolution producing it in
others; the climbing muscle, probably the oldest remnant and legacy that
has descended from our long-haired and muscular ancestry, is the best
example of disappearance caused by disuse, while the effectual
disappearance of the prepuce in many cases shows that in that regard
there exists a marked difference in the evolutionary march among
different individuals.

There is a strange and unaccountable condition of things, however,
connected with the prepuce that does not exist with the other vestiges
of our arboreal or sylvan existence. Firstly, the other conditions have
nothing that interferes with their disappearance; whereas the prepuce,
by its mechanical construction and the expanding portions which it
incloses, tends at times rather to its exaggerated development than to
its disappearance. Again, whereas the other vestiges have no injury that
they inflict by their presence, or danger that they cause their
possessors to run, the prepuce is from time of birth a source of
annoyance, danger, suffering, and death. Then, again, the other
conditions are not more developed at birth; whereas the prepuce seems,
in our pre-natal life, to have an unusual and unseen-fo