There has been considerable controversy surrounding the routine circumcision of male infants in the United States. This is of particular concern, since the medical establishments of all the other countries of the developed world have abandoned this procedure as having dubious benefits. This article examines the medical pros and cons of neonatal male circumcision in a historical perspective and suggests that the circumstances that led to its establishment as a routine practice are largely absent today. Reasons for its continued use and ethical and moral issues associated with its practice are then examined closely, especially in light of the current debate surrounding female circumcision. The article concludes that the medical and ethical issues surrounding this practice should be more broadly debated until there is some consensus as to its benefits. Prudence dictates that until such a consensus emerges, the practice should be suspended.

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Between 1943 and 1956, government archivists in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) collaborated with the publisher Chatto & Windus to produce a series of nine books. The collection was known as the 'Oppenheimer Series'. The volumes were published by the Central African Archives and offered in print, for the first time, the primary sources-diaries, correspondence, notes and maps-that chronicled the first English-speaking Europeans to visit south-central Africa. This paper explores the role of this publication event in building a settled identity for Europeans in Southern Rhodesia. The publication of the Series coincided with efforts by the Rhodesian archivists to bring manuscripts from the UK to their collection in Salisbury (Harare). These activities reveal a strategy not only to publish the history of European exploration and settlement in central Africa but to reify it through the physical presence of these books and the archival institution itself.

Abstract. This paper is about collecting, travel and the geographies of science. At one level it examines the circumstances that led to Isaac Lea's description in Philadelphia of six freshwater mussel shells of the family Unionidae, originally collected by John Kirk during David Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition, 1858-64. At another level it is about how travel is necessary in the making of scientific knowledge. Following these shells from south-eastern Africa to Philadelphia via London elucidates the journeys necessary for Kirk and Lea's scientific work to progress and illustrates that the production of what was held to be malacological knowledge occurred through collaborative endeavours that required the travel of the specimens themselves. Intermediaries in London acted to link the expedition, Kirk's efforts and Lea's classification across three continents and to facilitate the novel description of six species of freshwater mussel. The paper demonstrates the role of travel in the making of mid-nineteenthcentury natural history and in developing the relationships and credibility necessary to perform the research on which classifications undertaken elsewhere were based.

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