BUT reserving to treat upon these and other points more at large, in their place, I am to bespeak the reader’s candid construction, of my having, especially in the beginning of the first part, transiently availed myself of the authorities of authors, sacred and prophane. It is less that I think truth stands in need of such corroboratives, than to show that it is not destitute of them. It is not by authority, but by reason, that truth, in matters of temporal concernment, claims acceptance from reasonable beings. At the worst, those to whom they may present a tiresome prospect, have but to skip them over; or if they peruse them, they are desired not to forget that no stress is laid on them, beyond their being answers to arguments of the like nature, urged on the opposite side of the question. THOUGH instruments are not within my sphere of practice; though consequently I have the honor of not being personally very well acquainted with them, nor have I at hand all the original authors who have published their own inventions of them, I have been sufficiently enabled to do justice to their pretentions, by a recourse to those who professedly and fully treat of them. My guide is commonly Monsieur Levret, who is one of the exactest describers of them. Not most certainly that I otherwise prefer him, for of the utility of his forceps I think just as ill as I do of all the rest. I SHOULD have been glad to avoid at once the barren driness of abridgments furnishing no distinct ideas, and the tedious exactness of particularized descriptions and histories; as for example, of the forceps, as well as of errors committed by practitioners; but this medium I could rather wish than hope to keep. I have then been so afraid of obscuring matters by brevity, that of the two I have perhaps run too far into the contrary and less agreeable excess: which, however, in consideration of its favoring explicitness, is not perhaps the most inexcusable one. I WISH I could make an apology as receivable by a reader, who will doubtless be justly disgusted at the repetitions I have too little scrupled the making of the same thoughts, and even sometimes of the same expressions. Yet I dare bespeak, from his candor, some indulgence to the confession of a fault, it will easily be perceived I could not well escape, without the worse inconvenience to himself, of his being perplexed with references back to past pages, besides, that sometimes a chain of argument would be broke, consequently weakened, by the suppression of some link of it, on account of the matter having been elsewhere already employed in other connexions.