BUT if the damage in these cases resulting from an unskilful use of the hands should be urged against me: I answer, in the first place, that I am not arguing for any thing but what is to be effectuated by good practice: my point, is only to establish the superiority of skilful hands to the use of instruments: and in these cases, I aver, that even the damages done by the mispractice of defective hands, may be better repaired by sufficient ones, than by a recourse to instruments. How often too are instruments used by such men-operators, as are to the full as unfit to manage such instruments, bad as they are, as some women may be to use their hands! But if I could give no better reason for the rejection of instruments, than the abuse of them, even by the numbers of ignorant superficial men-practitioners that employ them, I should not expect to be heard; and yet the great argument against midwives is the ignorance of a few of them: though that ignorance of theirs could never produce such a multiplicity of horrors, of murders, injuries, tortures of mothers, such mutilations and massacres of children, as the deep learning of the instrumentarians! MY plea then is much more fair. The reader will be pleased to consider, and decide upon his own reflexions, whether, it is not at least probable, from what has been shewn in the cases of the obliquity of the uterus, of a head separate from the body of the fœtus, or even of that reputed most dangerous extremity, the head being hitched in the passage, when the whole body shall have come out, that every thing may be at least as hopefully attempted with the hands alone, as with those instruments, the use of which forms the sole reason for a recourse to men-practitioners; tho’, well considered, nothing could be a stronger reason against such a recourse than their using them. But let us proceed to the next case; When the head of the fœtus presents itself foremost, but sticks in the passage. FOR this section it is, that I have reserved to treat incidentally and more at large of the objections to be made in general to all instruments, and in particular to the principal ones.