up
any thing, replied Dr. Slop.--I beg your pardon,--answered my uncle
Toby.--Sir, replied Dr. Slop, it would astonish you to know what
improvements we have made of late years in all branches of obstetrical
knowledge, but particularly in that one single point of the safe and
expeditious extraction of the foetus,--which has received such lights,
that, for my part (holding up his hand) I declare I wonder how the world
has--I wish, quoth my uncle Toby, you had seen what prodigious armies we
had in Flanders.

Chapter 1.XLIV.

I have dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute,--to remind you
of one thing,--and to inform you of another.

What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of its due
course;--for it should have been told a hundred and fifty pages ago,
but that I foresaw then 'twould come in pat hereafter, and be of more
advantage here than elsewhere.--Writers had need look before them, to
keep up the spirit and connection of what they have in hand.

When these two things are done,--the curtain shall be drawn up again,
and my uncle Toby, my father, and Dr. Slop, shall go on with their
discourse, without any more interruption.

First, then, the matter which I have to remind you of, is this;--that
from the specimens of singularity in my father's notions in the point of
Christian-names, and that other previous point thereto,--you was led, I
think, into an opinion,--(and I am sure I said as much) that my father
was a gentleman altogether as odd and whimsical in fifty other opinions.
In truth, there was not a stage in the life of man, from the very first
act of his begetting,--down to the lean and slippered pantaloon in
his second childishness, but he had some favourite notion to himself,
springing out of it, as sceptical, and as far out of the high-way of
thinking, as these two which have been explained.

--Mr. Shandy, my father, Sir, would see nothing in the light in which
others placed it;--he placed things in his own light;--he would weigh
nothing in common scales;--no, he was too refined a researcher to lie
open to so gross an imposition.--To come at the exact weight of things
in the scientific steel-yard, the fulcrum, he would say, should be
almost invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets;--without
this the minutiae of philosophy, which would always turn the balance,
will have no weight at all. Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm,
was divisible in infinitum;--that the grains