attain the desired information. It is from time alone that this revelation may be expected. Three or four months of patience will enlighten you more than can this dangerous practice, the disgraceful essays of which are worse than the doubts that they would dissipate. Although the inconveniences of this practice are not so considerable for women as for girls, we would never do them the injustice to suppose, that it would not be painful for them to consent to an examination which ought to humiliate them in their own eyes, and which must sometimes render them contemptible in the eyes of others: they should free themselves from this torturing ceremony, though there was no other reason for it than its inutility for the object which induces them to submit to it."[36] Again, in the chapter on natural labour, Roussel says:-- "Final causes, which some philosophers would banish as a barren principle (which is perhaps true in natural philosophy), are in medicine the foundation of the most solid truths, which the ancients, and above all, Hippocrates, have transmitted to us. They have perhaps supposed that it was too trite and too commonplace to think that the Creator, who presided at the formation of our bodies, had made the mouth to eat, the eyes to see, and the ears to hear. We know not if it required much effort and subtle reasoning to divest them of the first ideas of common sense, but it seems to us, that they who reject altogether final causes discard perhaps as much truth as those who have most misused them, for it must be owned, that certain writers have made a strange use of them. Not to travel out of the subject which occupies us, we may quote M. Astruc,[37] who alleges that the coverings of the foetus, in engaging themselves at the same time with it in the orifice of the womb, serve to line that passage, and to defend it against the bruisings of the foetus, and _the fingers of the midwife_. To suppose that nature, in arranging the objects which should assist delivery, had contemplated the awkwardness of male and female midwives, is to impute to her a foresight which unhappily would be only too necessary, but that she had little for the errors that we are able to commit. She has done all for the best in our favour, so much the worse for us if we mar her work. _It must be_, said the same author, _that its face (of the foetus) was turned from the side of the os sacrum, to prevent its nose from being crushed by the bones of the pubes, and that it might not be suffocated by the waters of the amnios_. A child that had been living nine months in water to be suffocated, when passing out of it, by a few drops! O Astruc! have you well considered this?