perhaps more than any other, stands the fairest chance of being improved by women.

   FOR my part, I dare maintain it, that the surgeons, in form of men-midwives, have been the death of more children, with their speculum matricis, their crotchets, their extractors or forceps, their tire-tetes, &c. than they have preserved. If in killing the children, they have sav the lives of some mothers, they have hurt and damagd, not to say murdered, a number of others. Their faults ought to set us upon searching out for a better way of going to work; a more easy, a more safe one. This fatal operation by instruments might even be pronounced absolutely useless in the profession. There is no inveighing severely enough against so dangerous a doctrine as that which recommends them. Even common humanity requires an endeavour to open the eyes of those, who imagine they cannot do better than blindly to assent, in every point, to authors recommendable, it is true, by a number of good things, but whose authenticity in those points procures them but the more dange-