In our appeal we shall endeavor to go straight towards the mark, nothing concealing, undervaluing, or selfishly excusing. And, first of all, what part have physicians had in this great tragedy, wherein so many women have been chief players? For it is to the medical attendant that the community have a right to look for counsel, for assistance, and for protection, and the present is an evil more especially and directly coming within these bounds. From time immemorial such have been the deplorable tendencies of unbridled desire, of selfishness and extravagance, of an absence of true conjugal affection, there has existed in countless human breasts a wanton disregard for fœtal life, a practical approval of infanticide. This has, however, in the main been confined either to savage tribes, or to nations, like the Chinese, with a redundant population, with each of whom the slaughter of children after their birth is common, or to the lowest classes of more civilized communities, impelled either by shame, or, as in the burial clubs of the London poor, the revelations of which a year or two since so startled the world, by the stimulus of comparatively excessive pecuniary gain. That infanticide is of occasional occurrence in our own country, the effect of vice or of insanity, has long been known; instances being occasionally brought to the surface of society, and to notice by the police, and through courts of law. The closely allied crime of abortion also dates back through all history, like every other form or fruit of wickedness, originating in those deeply-lying passions coeval with the existence of mankind. Till of late, however, even physicians, who from time to time have accidentally become cognizant of an isolated instance, have supposed or hoped (and here the wish was father to the thought), that the evil was of slight and trivial extent, and therefore, and undoubtedly with the feeling that a thing so frightful and so repugnant to every instinct should be ignored, the profession have, until within a few years, preserved an almost unbroken silence upon the subject.