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32A : HISTORY OF DENTAL SUEGERY

tlieir control, and having for its object the advancement of dental surgery
as a science and as a profession. Their second, to organize dental prac-
titioners of standing and recognized ability into an association for tlie ad-
\ancement of professional interests, and third, and last, to institute a pro-
fessional school. All this was qiiickly accomplished, so well was it all planned,
and the dental profession came into being.
An association was formed in New York for the purpose of publishing
a dental Journal, and this association appointed as its publishing committee
Eleazar Rarmly, Elisha Baker, and Solyman Brown, who promptly issued
an address and prospectus under date of June 1, 1839, outlining the project.
The Journal was named the "American Journal of Dental Science" ; it
was to be published monthly, at a subscription price of three dollars per
annum for a single copy, or two dollars and fifty cents when more than one
copy was taken.
The advent of the Journal was announced by tlie following address of
the publishing committee to their professional brethren throughout the Uni-
ted States of America, dated June 1, 1839.
Gentlemen
The period has at length arrived when the profession to whieh we belong
assumes a commanding position in the public eye, and challenges successful rivalship
with other useful and profitable avocations of men. This fact is not less auspicious to
society at large, than to the professors of dental science, and practitioners of the
dental art.
Kven the members of the medical profession, so proverbial for their reluctance to
encourage innovations in the healing art, are beginning to discover the importance
of our cooperation in mitigating the woes, and protracting the duration of human
existence. The achievement of this object is to be ascribed to the noble spirit of
virtuous enterprise with which the present age is inspired, and which we see displayed
in every department of human industry and skill. If this spirit is sometimes developed
in excess, as when the splendid steam-vessel, ploughing in majesty the billows of the
ocean, is followed by the stupid steam-doctor, digging the graves for his victims on
tlie land, it is nevertheless, the consecrated agency by which the destinies of the world
are to be gloriously accomplished, and which already has so far transformed the aspect
of society, that, could the man who has slept for the last half century, be awakened
froni his slumbers, he would hardly recognize the world in which we live, as the place
of his original abode.
These magnificent results, to appreciate which the man of the present day must
traverse oceans by the energies of fire, and fly over plains and mountains on the wings
of the wind, are the products of human industry, goaded by a restless enterprise, and
guided by resistless genius.
Whether this industry, enterprise and genius are peculiar to the present age, or
whether the existing conditions of the sciences and arts is the ultimate result of a