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104 PATHOLOGY OF THE HABD TISSUES OF THE TEETH. ;
the chewing of meats or other stringy foods, should receive
immediate attention, the canse found and the condition remedied.
It may occur from a number of causes besides the beginning of
caries, and will occasionally be found in one, two or more teeth,
in mouths in which no caries has previously occurred. The
proximal contacts may be bad from faulty forms of the teeth
themselves, they may have become bad from movements of the
teeth after extractions, the contacts may have become flattened
by interproximal wear, but oftenest of all, they have become
bad because of beginning of proximal decay. I may say that,
personally. I have done no other thing for my patients that has
elicited keener expressions of appreciation than the correction
of this class of evils. If the dentists of this country would unite
in looking closely after these conditions and be careful in their
correction, it would add greatly to the comfort and welfare of
their communities, save thousands of teeth for useful service
and enhance the usefulness of dentistry.

INJURIES BY INTERPROXIMAL WEAR.
ILLUSTRATIONS: FICCRES 124-128.
The clinical consideration of caries of the proximal sur-
faces of the bicuspids and molars should not be passed without
more special mention of the injuries that result from interproxi-
mal wear and the flattening of the contact points from this cause
though it will be again presented from the technical view in the
second volume. The general principles governing the lodgment
of food debris between the teeth have been given under the last
heading, to which the reader is referred, in which interproximal
wear of the contact points was mentioned as one of the causes.
A certain indefinite amount of wear of the mutual points
of proximal contact between the teeth as they stand in the arch,
must be regarded as normal. Almost any tooth extracted after
the age of twenty-five or thirty years will show a facet of wear
on its point of contact with its fellow. A number of measure-
ments of these give an average of a loss of about one centimeter
in the length of the arch from this cause when measured on the
labial and buccal surfaces of the teeth around the arch from
the mesio-buccal cusp of one third molar to the other at the age
of forty years. This wear increases as the person grows older.
"When this wear is fairly even in its distribution among the
several teeth, it can not be regarded as abnormal, nor is it a
cause of material injury. Such wear does not loosen the normal