7. Or, if this fail, the smoke of marigolds, received up a woman’s privities by a funnel, has been known to bring away the after-birth, even when the midwife let go her hand. 8. Boil mugwort in water till it be very soft; then take it out, and apply it in the manner of a poultice to the navel of the labouring woman, and it instantly brings away the birth and after-birth. But special care must be taken to remove it as soon as they come away, lest by its longer tarrying it should draw away the womb also. SECT. IV. _Of Laborious and Difficult Labours, and how the Midwife is to proceed therein._ There are three sorts of bad labours, all painful and difficult, but not all properly unnatural. It will be necessary therefore to distinguish these. The _first_ of these labours is that wherein the mother and child suffer very much by extreme pain and difficulty, even though the child come right; and this is distinguishably called the laborious labour. The _second_ is that which is difficult, and differs not much from the former, except that, besides those extraordinary pains, it is generally attended with some unhappy accident, which by retarding the birth, causes the difficulty: but these difficulties being removed, it accelerates the birth, and hastens the delivery. Some have asked, what is the reason that women bring forth their children with so much pain? I answer, the sense of feeling is distributed to the whole body by the nerves; and the mouth of the womb being so strait that it must of necessity be dilated at the time of the woman’s delivery, the dilating thereof stretches the nerves, and from thence comes the pain. And therefore the reason why some women have more pain in their labour than others, proceeds from their having the mouth of the matrix more full of nerves than others. The best way to remove those difficulties that occasion hard pains and labour, is to show first from whence they proceed. Now the difficulty of labour proceeds either from the mother, or child, or both.