THE same Mr. Rathlaw, in the same piece, exclaiming against the use of the crotchets has this remark. “NO one (says he) can be ignorant of it’s being no longer the practice in France, or in England, to employ crotchets, or murderous tire-têtes (_would this were truth!_) in the deliveries, unless for a monstrous or hydrocephalous head, when the bulk of it is so enormous, that there is no possibility of getting it out whole, and especially if the child should be dead.... In my time, (adds this author) every eminent man-midwife had invented different means of extricating himself out of the plunge of such a case, and their reputation grew in proportion to their respective success. Yet, hitherto, I do not know, that either at Paris or at London, they have got such a length, as to take any particular instrument under their protection. Nine years ago, (Mr. Rathlaw continues) I had made a forceps almost wholly of my own invention to extract the fœtus by the head, and it often succeeded well with me. It was, as to its make, a good deal resembling that which Butter describes in the Edinburgh-acts, volume III. art. 20. But mine (proceeds he) seem to possess better proportions, and is certainly of a more handy use, than those which have hitherto appeared.” PLEASE to observe, that this forceps of Mr. Rathlaw is the same as Palfin’s, or rather as that of Gilles le Doux, excepting only the semilunar hollow cuts in the claws, which Monsieur Duffé, a surgeon of Paris, had contrived in them. The author says, it had _often_ succeeded well with him: he does not say _always_, and why? most probably because, when he did so _often_ find it of service, that was, only whenever there was no sort of occasion for using it at all. Do not let it here be imagined, that I force an inference. I give my reason. Supposing that such an instrument was necessary to every practitioner, the case for his using it cannot but rarely occur. Now those rare cases where Rathlaw judged his forceps necessary, and in which it failed him, were in all likelihood the true tests of its merit: whereas those other cases, in which he _often_ succeeded, may very well be taken for such as, with hands and patience, might have afforded a better account of them, than the silly superfluous quackery of employing a forceps, unless indeed his hands were too clumsy to attempt it. Otherwise the using instruments, where they sometimes do the work with so much more pain and danger, when the bare hands well conducted would do so much better, remind me naturally enough of what I have seen a pretty master do with a steel-instrument called a zig-zag or fruit-tongs, when, to display it, or out of wantonness, he has catched up fruit with it, that lay fully within the reach of his hand. In this piece of childishness there is however no mischief; whereas the man-midwife, for considerations of lucre, dallies with two lives to pluck at a fruit that is never, I