In minor degrees of pelvic contraction the obstetrical practice is either to induce premature labor at the thirty-second week, or to deliver by a cesarean operation, or to delay and try labor. In the last event there may be one of the following issues: spontaneous delivery, version and delivery, extraction by high forceps, cesarean delivery, symphyseotomy, hebosteotomy, or craniotomy. Craniotomy on a living child is never to be considered under any circumstances. Symphyseotomy is a cutting of the maternal pelvic girdle through the symphysis pubis, the rigid joint at the front middle part of the pelvis, and thus letting the bony girdle dilate. Hebosteotomy or pubiotomy is a sawing through the pelvis near that joint to get the dilatation. Symphyseotomy has been replaced by hebosteotomy because the maternal mortality and morbidity are somewhat lessened by the latter method. Schläfli in 1908 reported 700 hebosteotomies with a maternal mortality of 4.96 per cent. and a fetal of 9.18 per cent. Other operators have a better average; still others a worse. This operation is done very seldom of late except in a case where the fetal head is caught low in the pelvis, or there is a chin-posterior or brow or face presentation, and the cesarean operation would not deliver the child. The varieties of the cesarean delivery as practised at present are the classic cesarean, called also celiohysterotomy, the Porro cesarean, or celiohysterectomy, where the uterus is removed after the extraction of the child, and the two sections in the cervical end of the uterus, viz., the extraperitoneal cesarean and the transperitoneal cervical cesarean. Before the days of antiseptic surgery cesarean delivery was practically always fatal to the mother. Tarnier could not find one successful outcome for the mother in Paris during the nineteenth century up to his own time, and Spaeth said the same for Vienna up to 1877. In 1877 Porro of Pavia advised the supravaginal amputation of the uterus after the child was delivered to avoid hemorrhage and peritoneal infection. This operation replaced the classic cesarean until 1882, when Sänger invented a suture which would keep the uterine incision shut, and applied antisepsis. Sänger's operation has been improved so much that cesarean delivery, when performed by skilled obstetricians, has an extremely low mortality in cases which have not been infected. Routh, in 1910, collected the statistics of Great Britain, comprising 1282 cases, which may be taken as a standard for all civilized countries, and he found a steady decrease in the mortality until now it is near 2 per cent. in uninfected cases. The dangers in the operation increase with every hour the woman is in labor, but even then the general mortality is now down to about 8.1 per cent. This, it must be remembered, is the rate when competent men operate.