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INTRODUCTION. In all the history of dentistry the best efforts of the best operators, and the best thoughts of the best thinkers, have been persistently baffled by Pyorrhoea Alveolaris—erstwhile known as Riggs' Disease. Occasionally apparent cures have fallen to the lot of all intelligent practitioners who may have aspired to its treatment ; but unfortunately isolated cases of recovery failed to reveal a system by which this much dreaded affection might be treated with regularity of procedure and certainty of cure. The many methods and remedies suggested have served to lead only to hopeless confusion—one might almost say—to despair; so that, for all the years of the marvelous develop- ment of dental surgery, pyorrhoea alveolaris has been gener- erally conceded to be incurable. Condemned in advance on the slightest indications of the presence of this disease, thousands of teeth that are entirely free from dental caries are sacrificed to the forceps annually. In their emergency dentists have appealed to the medical profession for guidance, only to meet with disappointment, while this destroyer has marched on, triumphant over all theories, all appliances, all drugs ; a despair to conscientious y^ practitioners and a humiliation to science. The etiology of this disease still is unsatisfactorily explained ; its pathology is er- roneously written and diagnosis hopelessly ambiguous. Having been so widely at fault in the premises, how has it