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medical practitioners, we will enter immediately upon that which is its prime concern, namely, the practical aspects of the problem which to-day faces almost everyone in his own family practice. Whatever may be the ultimate needs of our race, whatever were the recent habits even of the passing generation, the undoubted, fact of the immediate present is that for a variety of sound reasons medical practitioners are daily called upon to advise patients who are involved in the problems of the individual control of their own reproductive powers.

The medical man has, or may have, on his shelves many textbooks and memoirs on almost every conceivable branch of medical practice, with the exception of this subject, the most vital of all to the health and well-being of his most important patient, the fertile married woman. On contraception no comprehensive scientific manual exists, and it is four years since my first small scientific text was published. There is, therefore, little need to apologize for adding the present work to the enormous number of books extant, since among them all no other covers the field from which its harvest will be drawn, and few other themes are of greater moment to the individual or to the nation.