The Hebrew women, when in captivity, had, as we read, two midwifes, Shiphrah and Puah. These were commanded by Pharaoh, that when they did the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, if a son should be born, they should kill him. But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt had commanded them, but saved the male children alive. The period of suckling appears to have been prolonged, in Bible times, to a much greater length than it is in modern times. In the Apocrypha, the woman says to the son, “I, who gave thee suck _three_ years.” Profane writers, prior to the time of Hippocrates, give little account of the art of midwifery; and from the time in which the Father of Medicine lived, down to a comparatively recent date, little was said or known concerning it as an art. Dr. Francis informs us, that toward the latter part of the sixteenth century, a Dr. Raynald published in England a work, the first of the kind that had appeared in that country, which he called the “Garden of Lying-in Women and Midwives.” It was afterward translated into the Latin, and most of the modern languages, and became the manual of instruction for females. “The popular prejudice was so great at that time in favor of female practitioners,” observes Dr. Francis, “that an unfortunate physician of Hamburgh was publicly branded, whom curiosity had induced to be present at a delivery, in female attire.” Still quoting from Dr. Francis, we learn, concerning this old work, the following particulars: “In his prologue to women readers, he states that the byrth of mankynd doth mostly concern and touch only women, and that he hath declined nothing at all from the steps of his Latin author, but that many things are newly added to this boke. In his first part of the work he gives the anatomy of the inward parts of women; in the second, he declares the divers sorts and manners of the deliverance or birth of mankind. In the third, he treats of the election and choice, by signs and tokens, of a good nurse, which may foster and bring up the child, being born. In the fourth and last, he communes of conception, with the causes hindering or furthering the same, showing the councils and remedies whereby the unfruitful may be made fruitful, and the impediments of conception, by virtue of medicines, removed. He solicits the favor of the reader to good acceptance of his labor and pains spent in compiling these aforesaid matters. He invocates all the nine muses of Helicon, with their poetical spirit, to breathe over this his boke, against the strange, perverse, and wayward wits who would desire this performance to be suppressed and kept in darkness, rather than that it be sent forth into the light. There is nothing, he says, that may not be abused and turned to evil, even meat and drink; but that to the good every thing turneth to good. He is fearful that the medicines he recommends may be abused; that light persons ought not to read his boke,