THIS is M. de la Motte, one of the ablest and most intelligent modern writers on the subject of midwifery, of which his works form an incontestable proof. The ingenuity and candor with which he has written, must render him less suspected than any other. This is no midwife. He is a man, and esteemed an able practitioner, who learned the principles of the art from Madam la Marche, head-midwife of the Hôtel Dieu at Paris. He made his advantage of the works of his predecessors Mauriceau, Peu, and of all the best authors on this subject. All that was worth it in them he has transfused into his own writings; and that in a very clear manner. He collected whatever the best physicians had usefully said on the diseases of mother and child: in short, he has added many good observations and reflexions of his own, in the journals of his manual practice: the reading of his works, with some precaution however, cannot but be useful to the students of the art. I DO this writer this justice, with the more readiness and pleasure, for, that though he himself exercised the profession of man-midwife, and consequently in favor of his own practice, and of the pupils he was bringing up, was not without the injustice of adopting the prejudices of his cotemporaries too indiscriminately against the midwives; he does not suppress any truth relative to the art itself. But even, as to the midwives, the truth escapes him without any design on his side of its coming out. But such is the force of truth. And thus it appears. M. De la Motte wrote in a little sorry country-town at a great distance from the capital, being at the very extremity of the kingdom of France, on a sea-coast, where there were no other midwives than poor country-women, without knowledge, without skill, or any other qualification, than a little of the habit of attending women in labor. Yet with all these deficiencies it will appear, that the men-practitioners were far more to be dreaded than those poor ignorant creatures, who had scarce any thing but Nature for their guide. I SHALL here give the substance of what he says in his preface, followed by some examples of the unskilfulness, or rather of the most profound ignorance of the most able men-midwives of his time, for forty leagues round his place of residence in the country. “IT is (says M. De la Motte) astonishing, that the obstetrical art should, until the beginning of the preceding age, have been left either to ignorant women, or to surgeons, who had not (any more than too many to this day) any other resource in difficult labors, than some instrument guided by undextrous hands, always sure of killing the child, and endangering the mother. Do not these poor innocents deserve compassion for being exposed to operations of surgery, which one would rationally think they could not need, till providence should have at least given them leave to come into the world?”