"The prophetical writings of the Old Testament furnish many allusions to painful parturition. The Jews inhabited a warm climate; and yet, were we to judge of parturition among them from the frequent reference the prophets make to it in figures and similes, when predicting the sufferings to be produced by impending judgments, we should conclude that in no people was nature's sorrow more severe. Thus, Jeremiah, the coming miseries of Judah passing before his vision, exclaims:--'I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the _anguish_ as of her that bringeth forth her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion that bewaileth herself, that spreadeth her hands.' A multitude of passages containing a similar allusion might be cited. In the historical part of the Scriptures, too, there is incidental mention of several cases in which parturition proved fatal. So much for the relaxing influence of a warm climate! a notion which, like various others respecting the influence of climate on the human system, is at variance with facts." Among the myriad peoples inhabiting the vast Continent which, in the aggregate, we term India, men-midwives are unknown. There have been, no doubt, attempts made by Europeans to introduce the abominable custom, but we believe, excepting in some of the towns most frequented by them, without any considerable success. As the inhabitants of Tahiti, and the isles of the Pacific, once the abode and very Paradise of nature in her glorious perfection, have found to their cost, so we fear in all other portions of the world's surface, where our boasted civilization has set its foot, the evils which accompany its progress invariably take precedence, and largely preponderate over its advantages. Wherefore should we add to the primal curse fulminated against woman, irrespective of locality or race, "in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children," a far greater one in the ruin of her modesty, by the introduction of man into the sanctuary hallowed by his absence from the beginning of the world. O ye fine ladies of England, who talk so glibly of all the virtues, and blazon your moral excellencies before the nations! if ye will not take example from the highly civilized and numberless ladies and women of China and the East, learn from the poor savage, in whom, though doomed to the lowest grade of earth's inhabitants, there yet glows fresh from Heaven, like a pure star gleaming through the night of heathenism, that loveliest attribute of woman--modesty. Over that mysterious rite which God has confided to the female sex, the rude, wild, cruel, ignorant, uncivilized, naked, idol-worshipping natives of New Holland, throw a veil impenetrable to man. Roberton says, page 480, "Among them (the New Hollanders) a man is not permitted to approach where parturition is going on." There are, however, rare and beautiful exceptions to that accursed fashion which now so debases the women of this country; for we have undoubted authority for