IN the next place, it may well be recommended to consideration, whether, as the _common methods_[15] confessedly allowed by the men-midwives to be the _preferable_ ones, since the recourse to instruments is not even by them _allowed_, until the _common methods_ are exhausted, there is not great reason, without breach of charity, to imagine that the natural unfitness of the men for the _common methods_ does not determine especially the common men-midwives to an over-hasty recourse to the _extraordinary_ ones, and make them see very _dangerous symptoms_, where they are no better than phantoms of their own creation; so that by their eagerness to embrace them for an excuse, they lose to the patient that benefit of patience in general, which Dr. Smellie himself allows in a particular case[16]. To which patience the midwives are so much more inclined than the men, as indeed they may well be, since, should that even be exhausted, they have no instruments to fly to for the abridgment of a labor: and where they understand their business, not only every thing is best done without them, but the want of them is prevented. BUT besides the common motive of impatience in the men-practitioners for resorting to that dangerous expedient of making short work, of which the women are unhappily incapable[17], or at least which the good artists among them hold in the contempt and detestation it deserves; are there no other motives from which recourse may be had to the instruments? I have hinted at some: but as the matter is of infinite importance, from the use made of these instruments, in introducing men into the practice of an art so appropriated to the women, it cannot but be of service even to the public, to discuss the justice at least of some of those hints, and examine whether there is any farther foundation for my fears, that the precipitancy of the men in their resorting to instruments, or to the prematurely forcing a delivery, to the utmost danger if both mother and child, whether, in short, the pretence of extremities may not, in some cases, have even other causes, than a natural incapacity for the _common method_, an ignorance of better practice, or their impatience.