BUT besides this reason taken from the moral impossibility of laying a timely foundation of practical knowledge in the male-sex, for preferring women under the false charge of ignorance, to the so unconsequentially boasted learning of the men, there remains a yet stronger argument against the male-practitioners: an argument furnished by nature herself, and of the which, every impartial reader’s own feelings will in course render himself the judge. NATURE has to all animals, from the man down to the lowest insect, to all vegetables, from the cedar to the hyssop, to all created beings, in short gives what is respectfully necessary for them. Nor can it without the grossest absurdity be imagined, that this tender universal parent, or call her by a yet more sacred name, the divine providence, would have failed women in a point of so great importance to them, as that of the ability to assist one another, in lying-in, at the same time, that she has given them so strong and so reasonable a sympathy for those of their sex in that condition? Can it be thought that nature, so vigilant, so attentive, to the production of fresh generations, through all beings, should have been deficient or indifferent as to women, her favourite work, the friend, the ornament of human kind? And so she must have been, if she had left her in the necessity of recourse to others than those of her own sex, in whom there exists so sensibly a superior aptitude for tending, nursing, comforting and relieving the sick, that even the men themselves, in their exigences of infirmities, can hardly do without them. But to say the truth, and as I have before remarked, nature has been even liberal in her accomplishments of those of the female sex for this office. Not content with giving them a heart strong imprinted with a particular sympathy for their own sex, on this occasion, a sympathy, which for its tenderness, has some resemblance or affinity to the instinctive love or _storge_ that parents have for their children; she has also bestowed on them a particular talent, both for the manual function in the delivery of women, and for all the concomitant requisites of their aid during the time of their lying-in: a talent in short, which may even be felt, without the necessity of definition or proof, to be superior to any possible attainment of the men in that art, though they should have sacrificed hecatombs of pregnant rabbits, or have brooded over thousands of coveys of eggs in their search of excellence in it. To say nothing of a certain softness, flexibility, and dexterity of hand, palpably denied to the men, there is, both in the management of the manual operation, and in the attendance due on those occasions, a quality in which the women, generally speaking, excel the men, and that is, patience, a quality more essential, more indispensable than can well be imagined. For on patience it is, that the salvation of both mother and child often depend; whether that patience is considered