BUT before I enter on this disquisition, I am to observe, that this objection to the surgeon’s commencing midwife, does not in the least attack the merit of that respectable body of men, the surgeons. No one can honor their profession more than I do: I even readily grant, that their skill in anatomy is of service to midwifery itself, into which it throws a great light. It would be easy for me to name, if requisite, several surgeons, who are not only an honor to their country, from their excellence in an art so beneficial to mankind, but an ornament to society, from their extensive humanity and charity. These, I am so far from thinking, will hold themselves honored by the men-midwives attempting to make a common-cause with them, that I rather depend on their bearing witness on the part of the women in this cause, which is indeed the cause of Nature, of that Nature which they study so practically, consequently so usefully, and with which they are so conversant. I am persuaded they can even furnish me with arguments, from their superior store of knowledge, in supplement to my deficiencies. The surgeons must look on these professors of midwifery as a kind of amphibious beings, hard to define, whose claim exhibits rather the deformity of a preternatural excrescence, or wen growing out of the chirurgical art, than the becomingness of a natural member of it. Most of the first founders of this new sect of instrumentarians in this country were, or I am greatly misinformed, neglected physicians, or surgeons without practice, who in supplement to their respective deficiencies, greedily snatched at the occasion at that time of a prevailing whim in France, of employing men-midwives, with just such a rage of fashion, as some of the ladies there prefer valet-de-chambres to waiting maids. This novelty then appeared to practitioners despairing of business enough in their own way, an excellent scheme for eking out their scanty cloth with this bit of a border, of which by degrees they have made to themselves a whole cloak. In short novelty joined, to the much exagerated objections to perhaps a few insufficient midwives, brought in and established a remedy yet worse than the disease. Their success encouraged others; and now behold swarms of pupils pullulating, and forming on the models before-mentioned. Thus two or three maggots have produced thousands. Iron and steel are not tender: and yet it was by the pretended necessity of resorting to instruments made of these metals, that these out-casts of either profession effectuated their introduction into a business so little made for them. Then it was, that not with the least squinting view to filthy lucre, but purely out of stark love and kindness to the women, that these redressers of wrongs, armed with their crotchets, and other weapons of death, took the field on the hardy adventure of rescuing the fair sex out of the dreadful hands of the ignorant midwives. But as to the validity of that plea of