IN Greece, Aspasia, and a number of other celebrated women, quoted by various authors, have applied themselves to our profession, and have left behind them valuable works on the method of delivering women, and of managing them both before and after their lying-in. MADAM Justin, midwife to the Electress of Brandenbourg, has also given us a very good treatise. Several professed midwives appointed to form the apprentices of the Hôtel Dieu at Paris, have written very clearly on the same subject, without however being mistresses of any more anatomy, than what was sufficient for their business. OBJECTION the Sixth. THE different instruments which the men have invented in aid of, and supplement to the deficiency of nature, and of which they are frequently obliged to make use in different labors, ought not to be put into the hands of midwives: and were it but for this reason alone, they ought to be excluded from the practice of this art. As, why multiply attendants unnecessarily? A man-midwife, with his instruments which he ought always to have about him, is enough for every thing: whereas a midwife, if the case requires instruments, will be obliged to have recourse to a man: consequently double embarrassment, double expence. ANSWER. THE keen instrumentarians bring an argument they imagine capable of banishing or exterminating all the midwives. The men, they say, enjoy alone the glorious privilege of using instruments, in order, as they pretend, to assist nature. But let them, I intreat of them, answer, whether if the question could be decided by votes, where is the kingdom, where is the nation, where is the town, where, in short, is the person that would prefer iron and steel to a hand of flesh, tender, soft, duly supple, dextrous, and trusting to its own feelings for what it is about: a hand that has no need of recourse to such an extremity as the use of instruments, always blind, dangerous, and especially for ever useless? WHAT has engaged men to invent and bequeath to their successors so many wonderful productions, for such they imagine them? Is it not the thirst of fame and money? These gentry have judged, that they ought to spare no lucubrations, no labor of the head, no efforts of the tongue and pen to procure themselves a strange reputation, supported by these horrible instruments. But these lucubrations, this labor of the head, would have been much better employed in seeking for the means of absolutely doing without them, as our good female practitioners have ever done, and as those of them still do, who are instructed in the right practice.