the physicians and surgeons, whose arts they have despised enough to think, they may be well enough learnt collaterally and subordinately to the mechanical operation of midwifery, as well as obliged to the midwives, to whom they _ought_ at least to go to school, tho’ sure to rail at their _ignorance_ the minute after being taught by them. In short, the most valuable lights thrown into this subject are undoubtedly furnished by those great men Boerhave, Haller, Heister, the great Harvey, and other the like excellent physicians and surgeons, not one of whom however, I presume, in the way of making a trade of it, ever delivered a woman in his life. NAY! was any accident requiring a chirurgical operation to befall a pregnant woman, I should think the application would be more safely made to a thorough regular-bred surgeon, than to one of the common run of these men-midwives; and the exceptions are so few, they are hardly worth making. The reason too for such a preference is obvious and natural. A regular surgeon probably would not only be more consummately skilful and expert in his general notions, both theoretical and practical, so far as surgery was in the question, but would not, from any thing only _partial_ in his profession, have the same temptation of bringing into play a horrid apparatus of murderous instruments, to show the importance and utility of that anatomical midwifery of theirs, all the art of which consists in the violences it offers to Nature. What would be to be done, the true surgeon could hardly do worse than the pragmatical man-midwife, and most probably would perform it much more artistlike, except perhaps in the sole point of striking a crotchet into the brain-pan of a live-child, or needlessly tearing open, with iron and steel, parts so tender and so delicate, as hardly to bear the touch of even the softest hand, guarded with all precaution. He would not, in short, be so forward to use means destructively dangerous to both mother and child, and at the best often to ruin a woman for being a mother for ever after. UPON the whole then, if any one will dare give his own understanding fair play, against the powers of prejudice and interested imposition, it cannot but, on a fair examination satisfy him, that that strange anomalous complex creature of the three arts, physic, surgery and midwifery, is most likely to excel in neither. IT may by great chance be an indifferent physician; IT must be in this respect a dangerous surgeon, but IT can never be any thing but a despicable midwife; or if that favorite name of _accoucheur_, IT is so fond of assuming, should not be popular enough from its gallicism, let IT change it for the Latin one of _Pudendist_: a word of not one jot a more pedantic coinage than _Dentist_, or _Oculist_, but of which moreover the propriety of the sound may somewhat atone for the pitiful play of words it contains, and which can yet scarcely be more pitiful than the object of its application.