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376 HISTOEY OF DEXTAL SUEGEHY

tical Treastise ou Dentistry," published at Berlin in 18ik;. That the Teutonic-
race was keeping in touch with dental progress is evinced by the number of
Gernuin translations made from the French writers of the period.
During the iirst years of the independence of the United States many were
the taunts her citizens had to bear for the barrenness of her literary harvests.
The conditions surrounding our early history were assuredly anything but
conducive to the grov>th of literature in any field. Take the colonial period,
with its few scattered villages strung along a thousand miles of seacoast, their
inhabitants struggling against savages, pestilence and poverty; the revolution-
ary period, with its seven years of warfare; the early national period, with its
stupendous j)roblems of government and finance to be solved ; where could a
man be spared to write? The final goad, necessitj", did not urge, for books,
were sent from the mother country. We can refer witliout shame to our un-
productiveness in the field of literature, for now our writers are in the front.
ranks, and Sydney Smith's cjuestion, "\Mio reads an American book?" is an-
swered in chorus, "The whole round world, and the inhabitants thereof."'"
Dental literature naturally kept pace with the other scientific literatures at
this time in America. During the colonial period, dentistry, as such, was
practically unknown. During tlie revolution the few books on that subject
reached us from foreign shores ; and when we consider the really alile and ver-
satile practitioners who lived during the early years of our national independ-
ence, it seems most remarkable that so few contributions were made to dental
literature. But the seed sown by the pioneer English and French dentists had
taken root, and during this apparently latent period, was making a healthv
and steady growth, which, before the end of the first half of the nineteenth,
century, was to bear as its fruit the three great factors in the development
of dental education : the Dental Journal, in 1839 ; the Dental Association,
in 1840, and the Dental College, the same year.
A great number of the early publications, both American and foreign, were
small popular works, which generally added more to the reputation of the
author than to the available literature of the profession, but they drew the
attention of the public to the value and importance of the teeth, and in this
way did much good. The first American production was a treatise on the
human teeth by B. C. Skinner, of New York, in 1801. This was followed by
a treatise on dentistry by B. T. Longbotham, of Baltimore, in 1803, in which
root filling is first recommended. Among the contributions during the first
(piarter of the centurj', were popular treatises of L. S. Parmly, in 1816 and
1830, and during the latter year lectures on the care, treatjiient and natu;al