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200 HISTOEY OF DENTAL SURGERY

insiifficient condensation. This is onl}' one of many causes of failure. Want of
method in tlie packing of the gold, resulting in imperfect adaptation to the
walls of the cavities, leaky fillings, accounts for nuiny failures. Faulty
methods in the preparation of cavities are another very large element in the
failure of fillings. A large jiroportion of operators do not give sufficient
attention to the position of margins of their cavities with reference, to render-
ing them self cleansing, hence in cases in which there is a strong predisposition
to caries, recurrence of decay, with final loss of the fillings will occur, though
the fillings may have been otherwise good. I'ailing fillings are constantly pre-
senting, which upon careful e.xamination jirove to have been put in cavities
improperly prepared in that tlie seat of the filling was insufificient to give
a sufficient area of gold to support the stress brought upon its occlusal portion
in mastication.''
The most important results of the experimental work of Dr. BUick, de-
scribed in this series of papers, and which liad been laborious in the extreme,
consuming a vast amount of time and much money, has been seen in the
improved character of amalgam alloys, as already mentioned, and in tlie
greater care and time and intelligent effort bestowed upon the making of
amalgam fillings. But the work upon gold and the fillings made in steel
matrices by so many different operators, and the defects in them which the
various tests made manifest, served as a very useful supplement to the former
series of papers on the "Management of the Enamel Margins," and the tests
of strength, specific gravity, relative hardness, etc., of the dentine ought by
this time to have hrovight to an end the talk about the teeth that "are too
soft to be filled with gold," and al)out the causative relation of softness of the
teeth to their liability to decay or of hardness of the teetli to their immunitv
from decay. Probably no one doubts that decay, after the enamel has lieen
penetrated, may make more rapid progress in a poorly organizeil tooth, having
large interglobular spaces and generally deficient in lime salts, than in a
tooth structurally perfect, but that this "softness" or "hardness" has little or
no relation to initial liability or iiiiuiunity to the beginning of caries, Dr.
Black's work seems to have established beyond reasonable question.

INLAYS.

Who made the first inlays this historian lias not attempted to discover.
They were formally unusual and fancy operations, not having any established
standing in the routine of ordinary practice. The "Xews Letter" for -Tanuarv,