,--it only
increases their mental dyspepsia.

Had Columbus waited to discover America, or had Galileo waited to
proclaim the motion of the earth, until authorized to a serious
consideration of the matter by properly-tabled statistics, they would
have waited a long, long time; and, it may be added, the inconveniences
that attend the proving of a negative will so interfere with the proper
arrangement of statistical matter which relates to the prepuce and
circumcision that, before such tables could be satisfactorily and
convincingly constructed, time and the evolutionary processes that
follow it will bid fair to completely remove this debatable appendage
from man. It may be at a very far-distant period that this evolutionary
preputial extinction will take place,--probably contemporary with the
existence of Bulwer's "Coming Race,"--but not at a too remote period for
the proper and satisfactory tabulation of the statistics.

The ideas of the etiology and pathological processes through which we
journey,--from a condition of health and good feeling to one of disease,
miserable feeling, and death,--as described in, or rather as they
control the sentiment and policy of, this work, are such as have been
followed by Hutchinson, Fothergill, Beale, Black, Albutt, and
Richardson, so that if I have totally ignored the old conventional
systems, with their hide-bound classification of diseases to control the
etiology, I have not done so without some reliable authority. In
studying the etiology of diseases we have, as a rule, been content to
accept the disease when fully formed and properly labeled, being
apparently satisfied with beginning our investigation not at the initial
point of departure from health, but at some distant point from this, at
the point where this departure has elaborated itself, on favorable
ground, into a tangible general or local disease. As truthfully observed
by T. Clifford Albutt: "The philosophic inquirer is not satisfied to
know that a person is suffering, for example, from a cancer. He desires
to know why he is so suffering,--that is, what are the processes which
necessarily precede or follow it. He wishes to include this phenomena,
now isolated, in a series of which it must necessarily be but a member,
to trace the period of which it must be but a phase. He believes that
diseased processes have their evolution and the laws of it, as have
other natural processes, and he believes that these are fixed and
kn