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it is not uncommon to have such cases apply for assistance after they have in vain tried to dilate the constricting preputial orifice. In the early writings of the Greeks, it is mentioned that among the Egyptians circumcision exempted them from a certain form of disease that affected the penis. Philon mentions particularly the immunity that the operation conferred against a species of affection which Michel Levy asserts to have been a gangrenous disease. So that, outside of any religious significance, there is no doubt that, in individual cases, circumcision has more than once been suggested, although it cannot be said that such individual cases would ever, or could, lead to its becoming a national or racial, much less a sectarian, rite. CHAPTER XVIII. THE PREPUCE AS AN OUTLAW, AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE GLANS. Ricord has well termed this appendage to civilized man "a useless bit of flesh." Times were, however, when--man living in a wild state, and when in imitation of some of our near relatives with tails and hairy bodies; when he still found locomotion on all-fours handier than on his two feet; when in pursuit of either the juicy grasshopper or other small game, or of the female of his own species to gratify his lust, or in the frantic rush to escape the clutches, fangs, or claws of a pursuing enemy, he was obliged to fly and leap over thorny briars and bramble-bushes or hornets' nests, or plunge through swamps alive with blood-sucking insects and leeches--Ricord's definition would certainly have been inapplicable. In those days, but for the protecting double fold of the preputial envelope that protected it from the thorns and cutting grasses, the coarse bark of trees, or the stings and bites of insects, the glans penis of primitive man would have often looked like the head of the proverbially duel-disfigured German university student, or the Bacchus-worshiping nose of a jolly British Boniface. So that in those days, unless primitive man was intended to have an organ that resembled a battle-scarred Roman legionary, a prepuce was an absolute necessity. With improvement in man's condition and his gradual evolution into a higher sphere, the assumption of the erect posture, and the great stride in civilization that originated the invention of the manufacture of the perineal band, which not only protected the glans in its thorny passage through life, but also acted like a protecting aegis to the scrotum and it
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