ALL due honor be to the original author of this sublime invention of the forceps, whoever was the happy mortal! happy, I say, according to Dr. Smellie, who calls it a “_fortunate contrivance_”[36]; though perhaps by fortunate, he rather means its having been so to himself. For hitherto, in all truth, I must own, that I do not find, even by the most exagerated accounts of the learned men-midwives, that those poor instruments of God’s making, the women’s fingers, would not much better, and much safer, do every thing that is pretended to be done by that same boasted instrument, or that can be done by any other human means. BUT let us suppose for an instant, what both my love and knowledge of the truth would hinder me from granting, that instruments are at some times, and in some sort necessary: in what case is it that they are necessary? this is what hitherto I do not know. And which instrument is it that a man-midwife must use? that is what I yet know less: nor do I believe there is any practitioner so presumptuously silly, as to admit any particular one, as the only one universally received and approved. It will perhaps be said, that according to the circumstances, each practitioner will, out of his bag of hard-ware, pick out that which will be fit for the occasion. But then, a waggon would not carry their whole armory, to calculate not only according to the various alterations made, if but in the forceps, by whim, desire of getting a name, or of increasing practice, but according to the various exigencies and circumstances to which the form of the instrument ought to be peculiarly adjusted. And upon every occasion, there is not the time for inventing, directing, or making a new instrument. But if it is said, that for want of such exactness, the general make of an instrument must do, in _all_ cases: that general make is not at least to be looked for in any of the kinds I have already quoted, by which such numbers of women and children must have been tortured or sacrificed, before they were exploded and given up, as good for nothing or insufficient, even by the men-practitioners themselves, who however substituted no others to them but what were rarely less exceptionable. They were only newer. Let us then now proceed to pass in a summary review the later and pretended improvements of this prodigious invention of the forceps, and candidly examine the validity of their claim over the women’s hands. MR. Rathlaw, a famous surgeon of Holland, in his dissertation on the means, or secret of Roger Roonhuysen, which was transmitted to his heirs, for extracting (as was said) in a very little time, a child, whose head should be embarrassed in the neck of the uterus, says thus, “TO me it appeared impossible, to establish an instrument, whose use should be so certain, so general, so necessary, that one could not be a man-midwife without having a knowledge of it.”