ar of
public opinion, as well as that of my professional brother, I would but
illy do justice to the subject at the bar, or to myself, not to properly
present the case; as it was remarked by Napoleon, "God is on the side of
the heaviest artillery," and he who loses a battle for want of guns
should not rail at Providence if, having them on hand, he has neglected
to bring them into action.

The reasons for the existence of the book will become self-evident as
the reader labors through the medical part of the work. Our text-books
are, as a class, even those on diseases of children as a specialty,
singularly and unpardonably silent and deficient on the subject of
either the prepuce and the diseases to which it leads, or circumcision;
and even our surgical works are not sufficiently explicit, as they deal
more with the developed disease and the operative measures for its
removal than on any preventive surgery or medicine. Our works on
medicine are equally silent, and, although from a perusal of the latter
part of the book the prepuce and circumcision will be seen to have
considerable bearing on the production and nature of phthisis, this
subject would, owing to our strabismic way of studying medicine, look
most singularly out of place in a work devoted to diseases of the lungs
or throat. Owing to this poverty of literature on the subject, and that
the library of the average practitioner could therefore not furnish all
the data relating to it that the profession have in their possession, a
book of this nature will furnish them the required material whereupon to
form the basis of an opinion on the subject.

To argue that the prepuce is not such a deadly appendage because so many
escape alive and well who are uncircumcised, would be as logical as to
assume that Lee's chief of artillery neglected to properly place his
guns on the heights back of Fredericksburg. He had asserted, the night
before the battle, that not a chicken could live on the intervening
plateau between the heights and the town. On the next day, when these
guns opened their fire, the Federals were unable to reach the heights,
while many men were for hours in the iron hail-sweeping discharges of
that artillery that mowed them down by whole ranks, and yet the majority
escaped alive. We take the middle ground, and, while admitting that many
escape alive with a prepuce, claim that more are crippled than are
visibly seen, as, like Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee," the