the increase of danger and pain they bring, to the already too much afflicted patients, they defraud them of the more efficacious, less painful, and especially more safe help of the hands alone. THE instrumentarians all then agree on that insufficiency of this precious forceps, which occasionally compels their recourse to the crotchet so detested even by themselves. Levret, for example, confesses this, p. 24, of the appendix to his observations. “THE crotchets (says he) are, generally speaking, instruments, the very sight of which shocks and terrifies: but notwithstanding the repugnance which all _good_ men-midwives ought to have to the using of them, there are cases in which there is no doing without them.” NOW in these cases, that of the monster with two heads[42], is not meant to be included, as Levret himself afterwards explains himself. If then there are such cases as necessitate a recourse to crotchets, it will, I presume, be allowed me, that they can be no other than those which render the delivery the most laborious. What those cases are, I have, from after the instrumentarians themselves reduced to the four capital ones, I have above set forth, without reckoning the pendulous belly. At least I know of no other situations than those, that can produce the very severe labors, nor do I believe that the instrumentarians know any other, or they would tell us so. Now if, in the more difficult of those cases, there is no doing without the crotchet, what becomes of the prodigious merit of the forceps, so insignificant in cases of the greatest need, and so superfluous in those others, where there being no occasion at all for it, it must be the most inhuman wantonness to employ it?