Containing various observations on the labor and delivery of lying-in women, including a discussion of the pretended necessity for the employing instruments. INTRODUCTION. NOTWITHSTANDING the numerous productions of writers on the art of succoring women in labor, all that has hitherto appeared on that subject, still leaves the mind unsatisfied; not that it is so unjust as to expect perfection in any human art, but from its feeling that, in this particular one, too much is given to theory, and too little to the practical part, or manual function. WHILE the causes of difficult labors are far from solidly or sufficiently explained, and rather obscured by a cloud of scientific jargon, than practically illustrated, they give us no tolerably sure method for preventing or remedying those difficulties. On the contrary, the whole boasted improvement of the art is reduced, to a pernicious recourse to instruments, which cut at once the knot they cannot unty. IT is then no wonder that there should still, in all the books and observations hitherto given on this matter, exist a void lamentably unfilled; and as this void evidently consists less in the theory than the practice, the superior qualifications, and natural endowments of the women for the manual operation, point out the fitness of the greater dependence on them for the filling up what, humanly speaking, can be filled up of that void. LET the physicians, the surgeons instruct the midwives in so much of anatomy as is necessary to their function; let them afford them, either in writing or verbally, their guidance and direction in the consequences or occasionally in the preliminaries of management of the lying-in; all this is right, salutary, and in due course: but that men should pretend to the manual operation in these cases, it certainly neither is nor can be their business. Nor is this negation of propriety a reproach to them. Will any man think it an indignity to be told, he cannot clear-starch, hem a ruffle, or make a bed as handily as a woman? The exceptions are the shame; and in this department of art it would be truer to say, that there are no exceptions than that there are only a few. BUT can we wonder at the insufficiency of the lights thrown into the art of midwifery by that cloud of writers who have treated of it, when so few of them having had any other view than advertising themselves, and being incapable of saying any thing to the purpose, of the art of delivering the women, have filled up their books with insignificant digressions, or things intirely foreign from the point?