“EDGE-TOOLS and crotchets naturally inspire horror, and though they _ought_ not to be employed unless on a dead child, it is well known the mother is not always _safe_ from the effect of them. Besides there are _no signs_ of the death of a child, though he should have stuck in the passage for several days ... _certain enough_ to authorize a recourse to a method which infallibly _kills_ it, if it is not dead before. This is so true, that whoever will turn over the authors antient and modern, on this subject, there is not _one_ of them that gives us _satisfaction_ on this point. On the contrary, they _all_ seem _agreed_ on the _insufficiency_ of these signs, and there are even _few_ of them who do not bring examples to support this uncertainty. “HERE follows one taken from the observations of Saviard, p. 367. This author says, that a chirurgical operator, whose name he _prudently_ suppresses, being sent for in aid of a midwife[9], to extract a child that had stuck six days in the passage, and which he _thought_ dead, from several of the signs most essential to conviction, it happened however, that having opened with his _bistory_ the teguments and membranes which occupy the as yet unossified space, at the commissure of the parietal bones with the fontanelle, it happened (said he) that on opening this place with his bistory, introducing his crotchet at this opening, and having fixed it in one of the parietals, he drew out the child, who began to cry _piercingly_, all hurt as he was by so _large_ a _wound_, that there came out of it more than an egg full of its _brains_, which made a _cruel_ sight in the eyes of the by-standers, and a very mortifying one for the operator. “IT were to be wished that this was the _only_ example: but I will not relate any _more_; it is easy to think one cannot be too _circumspect_ in the matter of such relations. Levret, p. 77.”