THE art of midwifery then, in its management by women, carries with it, in the recommendation of order, modesty, propriety, ease, diminution of pain and danger, all the marks of the providential care of Nature. It is imaged by the incubation of a brood-hen, assiduously watching over her charge, and tenderly hatching it with her genial heat. Whereas the function of this art, officiated by men, has ever something barbarously uncouth, indecent, mean, nauseous, shockingly unmanly and out of character: and, above all, of lame or imperfect in it. It strongly suggests the idea of the chicken-ovens in Egypt, kept by a particular set of people, who make a livelihood of the secret, which they, it seems, ingross of that curious art of hatching of eggs by a forced artificial heat: a practice, which, like the other refinements of dungbeds for the same purpose, or that of committing the rearing or education of the chickens to[44]“_cocks_, to _capons_, or to _artificial wooden mothers_,” may sound indeed vastly ingenious; but besides the numbers that perish the victims of those experiments, many of the productions of such methods of hatching are observed to be maimed, wanting a leg or a wing, or some way damaged or defective. The comparison breaks indeed in that, at least, the grown hens themselves escape damage, which is not often the case of mothers under those heteroclite beings the men-midwives; or, if they do escape, it is no thanks to those operators, but to the prevalence of Nature over their pragmatical intervention, so fit only to disturb, thwart, or oppose her effects, and in every sense to deprive the unhappy women that trust them of her common benefit. BUT while superior considerations of humanity so justly intercede for the mothers, while I strenuously contend for the preference to be, without hesitation, due to the mother over the child, especially in that dreadful dilemma, where one must be sacrificed to the safety of the other; supposing such a dreadful alternative ever to exist, which I much doubt, or at least, not to exist so often as it is rashly taken for granted, and even then, where the effects do not always follow the resolution taken thereon, since, though the child is always certainly lost, the mother is far from always saved, when, by a judicious preventiveness in practice, neither of them might perhaps have been so much as in jeopardy; while, I say, I plead for the preferable attention to the mothers, I hope no mothers will think me the worse intentioned towards them, for giving the lives of their children the second place in my tender concern for the safety of both.