FOR as to vanity, or any presumption, on my part, of any thing so weak, so unauthoritative as my representation, having any chance to remove the abuses, not however the less existent for that incapacity of mine to remove them, my knowledge of the world would alone defend me from so ridiculously wild a thought. I am but too well aware of the tenaciousness of especially false prejudice in most minds, where it has once gained entrance, and with whom prepossession is ever eleven points of the right. I have then purely had in view the discharge of that duty, incumbent on every member of human society, to oppose such errors as appear to be pernicious to the good of it. In that light I have beheld the growing practice of the instrumentarians, and in that sincere belief I have hazarded the publication of my sentiments, without surely pretending to any authority over the opinion of others. That I chearfully leave to every one’s reason, who is capable of reason. And to write for others than the rational, would be only labor deservedly lost. AS to injustice, I am, at least, clear of that of partiality to my own sex. I grant and lament as much as any one the incompetency of but too many of the midwives. The number of such cannot be too little. But then would the banishing them out of the practice be preferable to the having them better taught, especially since there is nothing but what is so much worse to put in their room, men and instruments? What occasion too for such a dangerous extremity? For as the deficiency is evident, so are the causes: which are not only the want of sufficient care in the training and education of women to this profession, but the actual discouragement, which must grow every day greater and greater, by the encroachments of the instrumentarians, whose plea for supplanting them will be consequently strengthened by that alarming scarcity of capable midwives, which themselves will have so much contributed to create. These being then the principal causes, and well known to be so, the remedies are not obscure, nor hard to attain.