"Roussel was endowed with a delicate constitution. He had been suffering more than usual for many days, when he quitted Paris to retire into the country, to M. Falaize, near Chateaudun. Enfeebled by prolonged sufferings, he soon yielded to the attack of a fever which raged epidemically in the neighbourhood. He sank under it the second complementary day of the year X. (1802), aged about sixty years. Roussel had possessed devoted friends; those who survived him remained faithful to his memory. Alibert recorded his life with touching eloquence. He did more; he collected his principal writings, of which some were disseminated in the journals, and published an edition of his works." This account of Roussel, brief as it is, will suffice to inform our readers that he was no ordinary man, and that, from his learning, and long experience as a physician, his opinions and reflections upon "the pretended art" of man-midwifery are entitled to the greatest respect. Those who would ridicule his sentiments, and treat his arguments as false and visionary, and his ideas as antiquated and unsuited to the taste and advancement of the present day, are those who, from mean and despicable motives of self-interest, would confirm the vicious system which Roussel has denounced, and, while destroying woman's modesty, would erect their own fortune on its ruins. Towards the end of the preface to the Physical and Moral System of Woman, will be found the following sentences, which we would commend to the serious consideration of every man whose sense of decency has not been altogether obliterated, and whose mind still retains any of those finer feelings, which God, when he made man in his own image, implanted in the human breast. "It is not the same, perhaps, with the abuses introduced by that art, almost unknown among the ancients, which, under the pretence of assisting nature in producing man, itself sometimes prevents his seeing the light, in attempting to do that which she unaided could more effectually perform; which enervates in woman, by effeminacy and the needless lengthening out of precautions, the instinct, which alone puts them in a condition to do without it. In fine, which, by a usage, as indecently as unreasonably repeated in men's attendance upon women, enfeebles, and at length annihilates the sentiment which most adorns the sex. I have made some reflections upon this pretended art in the chapter which treats of natural labour." Again, in the chapter on pregnancy, Roussel speaks trumpet-tongued, not only against the indelicacy, but of the absolute inutility of those digital examinations _per vaginam_ now in vogue, and so dogmatically prescribed in the text books of midwifery.