FOR here and throughout the reader will please to observe, that it is on the superiority of safety in employing midwives that I impugn the growing fashion of a recourse to men-practitioners. It is the side of Nature I take against a set of mean mercenaries, who commit the cruellest outrages upon her, under the falsest of all pretences in them, that of assisting her. I would not be so criminal as to wish the benefit of a false argument, in a point of life and death to those mothers and children, my tender care, even could I be silly enough to imagine, that I could pass such an one upon my reader. I wave therefore all plea of the novelty of this upstart profession of men-midwives. Such a plea I readily confess is not receivable. Were It so, how many valuable discoveries or improvements must have been stifled in their birth, if the objection to their being novelties was a valid one? All that I would contend for is, that an innovation should not be admitted only because it is an innovation; and that the decision of a matter of such capital importance, is better left to Reason, always herself submissive to Nature, than abandoned to Fashion, which so often acknowledges no other jurisdiction than that of whim or humor. THERE is no prescription for error, no sanction in custom against improvements. But certainly in such a capital point as the life of so many human creatures, in short, in one of the most sacred objects of government, that of population, such a novelty as that of bringing men-midwives into general practice, requires rather a greater authority than that of Fashion, while there is such a standard of essay as Reason. INOCULATION was not long since a novelty in this nation. The lady who introduced it, for any thing I know to the contrary, still lives to enjoy the honor of having procured so great a benefit to mankind. But then this benefit would bear the fairest of all trials, that of calculation: for what is reason itself but another word for calculation? The procuring then the small-pox by inoculation, in a body duly prepared, and especially at an eligible age, affords, according to the doctrine of chances, so much a fairer prospect of safety, than in the case of a spontaneous or accidental infection, that nothing scarcely could be imagined more friendly to Nature than such a rational prevention of her danger, from a distemper too rarely escaped, for the possibility of that escape to be employed as an argument against such a method of prevention. Here then the seeming violence offered to Nature, appeals for its justification to Nature, Reason and Experience.