would
seem to have no connecting-link with any preputial condition.

It has already been suggested that the prepuce does not at all ages bear
the same analogous relation to man. In childhood, especially during our
earliest years, it is out of all proportion in size when compared to the
rest of the organ, or to any use it may have placed to its credit. Man
does not, then, certainly need that refinement of nervous sensitiveness
in the corona that is useful in after life in inducing the flow or
ejaculation of the seminal fluid; neither is there at that age much of a
corona to protect. In middle life, or what might be called the
procreative period of man, when the corona would seem to require all its
excitability or sensitiveness, seems to be the very season in life when
the glans is most apt to remain uncovered; so that nature and this
hypothetical idea of the use of the prepuce are evidently at variance.
So we go through childhood with this long funnel-shaped appendage into
manhood, when the increasing size of the body of the penis restores a
sort of equilibrium between the size and bulk of the organ and its
integumentary covering. At this period, as we have seen, although it
does not, from the equilibrium restored, and the more or less use to
which it is subjected, induce any great immediate or uncomplicated
troubles, it nevertheless endangers the existence of the penis through
the accidental course of some putrid or continued fever, or it subjects
man to the manifold dangers of venereal or tubercular infections.

In advanced age, owing to the diminution in size of the organ, the
prepuce resumes the proportionate bulky dimensions of childhood, and as
the organ recedes and becomes more and more diminutive, the prepuce
again, like in childhood, begins to tend to phimosis; the urine of the
aged is also more irritating and prone to decomposition or putrefaction,
and the constant state of moisture that the preputial canal of the aged
is necessarily kept in, either by frequent urination or the incomplete
emptying of the urethra that is peculiar to old age, and which results
in more or less dribbling, is a powerful factor in inducing the many
attacks of posthitis and balanitis, as well as those attacks of
excoriation and eczema which are so annoying to the aged. I have often
seen such cases happening to men past fifty, who, being widowers, and
never having had anything of the kind, as well as being in the most
complete ignoran