Munster found it practised in Abyssinia, but as a mark of nobility confined to the descendants of “Nicaules, queen of Sheba.”  The Abyssinians still follow the Jews in performing the rite within eight days after the birth and baptise boys after forty and girls after eighty days.  When a circumcised man became a Jew he was bled before three witnesses at the place where the prepuce had been cut off and this was called the “Blood of alliance.”  Apostate Jews effaced the sing of circumcision:  so in 1 Matt. i. 16, fecerunt sibi praeputia et recesserunt a Testamento Sancto.  Thus making prepuces was called by the Hebrews Meshookim=recutitis, and there is an allusion to it in 1 Cor. vii. 18, 19, {Greek} (Farrar, Paul ii. 70).  St. Jerome and others deny the possibility; but Mirabeau (Akropodie) relates how Father Conning by liniments of oil, suspending weights, and wearing the virga in a box gained in 43 days 71/4 lines.  The process is still practiced by Armenians and other Christians who, compelled to Islamise, wish to return to Christianity.  I cannot however find a similar artifice applied to a circumcised clitoris.  The simplest form of circumcision is mere amputation of the prepuce and I have noted (vol. v. 209) the difference between the Moslem and the Jewish rite, the latter according to some being supposed to heal in kindlier way.  But the varieties of circumcision are immense.  Probably none is more terrible than that practiced in the Province Al-Asir, the old Ophir, Iying south of Al-Hijaz, where it is called Salkh, lit.=scarification The patient, usually from ten to twelve years old, is placed upon raised ground holding m right hand a spear, whose heel rests upon his foot and whose point shows every tremour of the nerves.  The tribe stands about him to pass judgment on his fortitude and the barber performs the operation with the Jumbiyah-dagger, sharp as a razor.  First he makes a shallow cut, severing only the skin across the belly immediately below the navel, and similar incisions down each groin; then he tears off the epidermis from the cuts downwards and flays the testicles and the penis, ending with amputation of the foreskin.  Meanwhile the spear must not tremble and in some clans the lad holds a dagger over the back of the stooping barber, crying, “Cut and fear not!” When the ordeal is over, he exclaims, “Allaho Akbar!” and attempts to walk towards the tents soon falling for pain and nervous exhaustion, but the more steps he takes the more applause he gains.  He is dieted with camel’s milk, the wound is treated with salt and turmeric, and the chances in his favour are about ten to one.  No body-pile or pecten ever grows upon the excoriated part which preserves through life a livid ashen hue.  Whilst Mohammed Ali Pasha occupied the province he forbade “scarification” under pain of impalement, but it was resumed the moment he left Al-Asir.  In Africa not only is circumcision indigenous, the operation varies more or less in the different tribes.