THE instrument used by Mr. Giffard, man-midwife, is supposed by Levret and others to be nothing more than the windowed forceps, of which the use had been long before known. But that appears as unsatisfactory as others. Mr. Freke too, it seems, furnished a new kind of corrected forceps, the chief merit pretended of which was, that the extremity of one of the blades was curved in form of a crotchet, and that this extremity might be _concealed_ when not employed as a crotchet, and consequently helped to avoid the having a multiplicity of instruments, as this new-fangled one might, upon an occasion, serve either for crotchet or forceps.—What a prodigious strain of sublime invention is this of death and wounds in various shapes! I FIND too that Chapman is blamed, for that, in his essay on the art of midwifery, he very frankly condemns all the tire-têtes he had seen employed till his time by all other practitioners, but he has not, it seems, given a description of the one he himself used, nor doubtless the method of using it, the one necessarily depending on the other. Nor where that author speaks of passing a ribbon over the head of a child, is he so good as to tell you how he managed to get it over. I MUST not here omit some mention of the forceps, pretended to be improved by Dr. Smellie. Upon which, however, I shall spare the reader a tedious minute discussion of its form, and of its advantages and disadvantages, comparatively to other forceps calculated for the same use. Levret may to the curious furnish sufficient satisfaction on that head. He has examined it with great exactness and seeming candor, even though he prefers his own to it. Nothing can be plainer, than its being just as insignificant and foolish a gimcrack as any of the rest. But there is one particularity, of which Levret takes notice, that I cannot well omit mentioning. The Dr. has, it seems, whether to spare the women the shock of the gleam from a polished steel instrument, or, whether to defend them from the injury of that metalline chill, which is not well to be cured by any warming at the fire, covered his instrument with leather spirally wound round it. Levret upon this concludes his remarks with the following one. “The ledges or roughness which the leather must, _besides increasing its bulk_, create by those its spiral circumvolutions, cannot but be such an obstacle to the introduction of the instrument, as to let it be serviceable only in those cases where (N. B.)—one may do _very well without it_. For it is well known, than in those cases where recourse to it is requisite, the most polished, the most smooth instrument often finds such great difficulties in its intromission, that nothing but a hand, _consummately_ expert in the use of this instrument[38] can, without damage, remove the impediments.”