I SAY necessary, because it is from this practice of touching that we draw our prognostics, both for the predisposition of the passage, in order to save pain by proper anticipation, and to smooth or facilitate a happy delivery. It is then the touch that serves us for a guide, and certifies to us the situation of the uterus, its rectitude or its obliquity, as well as what part the fœtus presents. IT is in short by the information we receive from the touch, that we are enabled in good time to remedy, or at least to lessen all the obstacles: so that by the very same means, by which we obviate any necessity of recourse to instruments, we at the same time alleviate the pains and sufferings of the party: which one would think no inconsiderable advantage of the female over the male practice, which last is so constitutionally more rough and more violent. SUCH is the capital importance of the TOUCH, undeniable, I presume even by the men-practitioners. But will any of the hemidwives then, with those special delicate soft hands of theirs, and their long taper pretty fingers, pretend to vye with the women in the exquisite sense or faculty of the touch, with which Nature herself has so palpably endowed and qualified them for the necessary shreudness of discernment, that in them it can scarcely be deemed an acquisition of art? If the encroachments however of the male-practitioners proceed, under color of their vast superiority, I should not be surprized at seeing, ere long, a grave set of grey-bearded gentlemen-midwives impannelled in lieu of a jury of matrons, on a female convict pleading her belly. What can hinder the redress of such a grievance, as the law has authorized for so many ages, but the object not being one of a pecuniary enough interest to tempt the men to interfere in it? they would be in the wrong however not to apply for the office, since it would not be one of the least innocent occasions for them to improve their hand in the mistery of _touching_. BUT let them pretend what they will, so great is the advantage, so liberal of her gift has Nature been to women, in that aptitude of theirs, which may be termed a knack of touching, that the hand of a true midwife will, at the deriving of indications from the report of its touch, beat the most scientific head of a man-practitioner, though stuffed never so full with Greek and Latin. Yes, an ignorant midwife, without perhaps anatomy enough to know where the _pineal gland_ is, or without so much as having heard the name of the _ossa innominata_, and with purely her expertness, and with that sort of knowledge she has at her fingers ends, will give you a more useful and practical account of matters, as they go, where it is sometimes so infinitely important to know how they go, than the most learned anatomist that ever dissected a corpse, brandished a forceps, stuck a crotchet into a child’s brain-pan, or tore open a living woman.