Madame Boivin[8] in the dedication of her "Memorial de l'Art des Accouchements," 4me ed., says:--"Moved and affected by the painful cries which mothers, victims of barbarity and ignorance, caused to be heard from far, the Government hastened to reply to them by establishing a practical School of Midwifery within the Lying-in Hospital: from all parts were summoned, _not men but women_, to come and assist at the lectures of the most eminent professors of surgery and medicine.... Already a great number have, from this fertile source of instruction, derived the knowledge and the qualities necessary for the exercise of an art so important in its results to the population of the kingdom and the happiness of families." In the preface to the above treatise, 4me ed., p. 10, we read the following allusion to the practice on this side the channel; "Thus you will find in this edition some novel remarks ... on certain cases of difficult labour, and on the operative process practised in these cases, so brutally treated by practitioners beyond sea, and in a manner so simple and so happily different by us, especially at the School of Midwifery in Paris." And what are we about in "moral England," all this time? Where are our colleges of instruction, to which we have summoned "_not men but women_"--our _Hospices de la Maternite_,[9] wherein and whereby we may preserve the modesty of our women? Where is the voice to cry shame upon the custom which introduces men into the sacred precincts of the marriage chamber to perform offices which are, by nature, the duty of women alone?[10] Shall it be said that two thousand years ago the Romans possessed a higher sense of moral feeling than we do now? Roussel says, "The principal reason which, among the ancients, forbade the belief that the duty of aiding delivery could be proper to any but women--excepting in cases of very rare occurrence, where every consideration might necessarily yield to a pressing danger--was the grand interest of manners. This was an object to which ancient Governments had always special regard. They knew morality to be the foundation of all legislation, and that good laws would be made in vain unless good morals insured their execution. The cruelty of Archagathus' surgical operations drove the doctors from Rome. She banished also from her bosom the Greek philosophers and orators who were accused of having introduced and cultivated the taste for the arts and vices of Greece. She would surely not have permitted, for any length of time, the existence of an art, which, practised by men, would, under the specious pretence of utility, threaten the sanctuary of marriage, and which, striking a blow at the chief safeguard of families, would next attack the mainsprings of the state; an art which, with power to alarm the modesty of women, would soon leave them without a blush,[11] and cause them to lose even the recollection of that severe virtue which had