HERE you have from an unsuspected authority a certainly not over-rated importance of the expedience of preliminary TOUCHING. Now granting, only for argument’s sake, what is assuredly false, that a man-practitioner can be equal (superior he would not in this point, at least, have the impudence to pretend himself) to a midwife; let a husband, let a wife, but reflect on the difference, every thing else being equal, there must be as to _modesty_, between the function of _touching_ being performed by a man or by a woman. Let a husband, I say, for an instant figure to himself what a figure he must make, what a figure his wife must make, under such a ceremony performed by a lusty HE-MIDWIFE, exploring those arcana of the female fabric, and especially to so little purpose, with his natural disqualifications for so much as knowing what he is about. Will the husband be present? What must be the wife’s confusion during so nauseous and so gross a scene? Will he _modestly_ withdraw while his wife is so _served_? What must be his wife’s danger from one of those rummagers, if she should be handsome enough to deserve his attention, or a compliment from him on such a visitation of her secret charms, the more flattering from _him_, not only as he must be supposed so good a judge from the frequency of his occasions of comparison, but as it must imply a superior corporal merit in the woman so visited, as could overcome that satiety which a fastidious plenty of patients might so naturally be imagined to create in a man-midwife? Will any one say, that these suppositions are over-strained, or out of Nature? I fancy, that if the secret histories of many families were ransacked, of the practice on which the men-midwives were in possession, it would not be always found, that those preliminary visitations were not turned to some account of interest or seduction. And yet an omission of that _touching_ might be dangerous. How kind is it then in Nature, to have of herself so far consulted the good and tranquility of society, in palpably bestowing upon women a faculty, which she has as palpably refused to the men, in whom the exercise of it would for obvious reasons be big with so many inconveniences? Is there any breach of charity in the taking for granted the existence of such inconveniences, unless indeed, all of a sudden, in favor of this lucre-begotten sect, the men were ceased to be men, and the women women?