TO those then, who with a contemptuous tone ask what is a woman but a woman? I shall with equal modesty and truth answer, that generally speaking women are inferior to men in most public services. They are scarcely so fit to head armies, to navigate ships, break horses, or the like manly employs: but there are certainly domestic branches, in which they rather make a better figure than the men. Midwifery seems their appropriate lot: and rather a gift than an acquisition. They hold from nature herself, in this matter, a certain expertness and dexterity, to which not all the more abstruse refinement of art can ever conduct the men. Nor will the operation of iron and steel instruments ever equal the suppleness, safety and effectual ministry of the fingers of an expert midwife, who understands her business. LET me then be permitted to ask retortingly in my turn, What is, at the best, a man-midwife? Is not he one of a new set of operators unknown to our ancestors? A creature in short hard to be defined? In no original or primitive language is there so much as a word to express one of this profession. The common word for him in the English language is a contradiction in terms, a monstrous incongruity; a MAN-_mid_-WIFE. Sensible of the ridiculous sound of this expression, scarcely less so than that of a _woman_-coach-_man_, they have, by way of remedy, borrowed the term of _accoucheur_ from that nation whence the fashion was unhappily borrowed, among many other fashions, so many of which are however rather ridiculous, than like this one _big_ with danger, added to the ridicule of it. But even that affected French word _accoucheur_ is of a very recent date in France. No French authors employ it, who are not themselves of a more modern date than the word itself, which has not above the antiquity of a century to boast. The name and vocation of a midwife are found in the most primitive languages, being, in fact, coeval with mankind itself.