IN this attempt of mine there is no blamable ostentation. If I set in their just light of utility the qualifications of the women of our profession, as to industry, dexterity, ease of execution, patience, constitutional tenderness, and especially natural aptitude, it is no more than practical truth warrants, and the throwing a due light into the matter of comparison requires. Yet I do not wish, that we should pass for any thing beyond what we really are. All the partiality, all the tender feelings it is so natural for me to have for the sufferings of my own sex, would be sufficient to with-hold me from desiring to establish any opinion or practice tending to endanger the personal safety of women in child-birth, or of any thing so dear to them as their children. I am myself a mother. I OWN however there are but too few midwives who are sufficiently mistresses in their profession. In this they are some of them but too near upon a level with the men-midwives, with this difference however in favor of the female practitioners, that they are incapable of doing so much actual mischief as the male-ones, oftenest more ignorant than themselves, but who with less tenderness and more rashness go to work with their instruments, where the skill and management of a good midwife would have probably prevented the difficulty, or even after its coming into existence, prove more efficacious towards saving both mother and child; always with due preference however to the mother. I WILL also, with the same candor, own that there are some not intirely incapable men-midwives: but they are so very rare, and must forever necessarily be so, and even, at the best, so inferior to good midwives, that a worse office could scarce be done to mankind, that on so false a supposition as that of a sufficient ability in them, to explode the practice of the art by women, because some of them might be exceptionable. And how should it be otherwise, than that some should be more deficient than others? is there that art in the world, to which the same objection does not lie of different degrees of merit in the professors of it, as well as that of the imperfection of all human arts in general? IN the mean time, the consequences of this unfair conclusion against the women professors of midwifery, in affording the men a plea for supplanting them, do not hitherto appear very advantageous ones to the public. It remains, I fancy, to be proved, that population is any gainer by the diminution of that evil, to which the instruments or other methods of practice, employed by the men, are pretended to be such a remedy. TO examine this point is the object of the following sheets; the work being divided into two parts.