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PREPARATORY TO FILLING 201

essence and hydronaplithol. By this means not only
soft dentine but hard dentine may be completely
sterilised {Journal of the British Dental Associa-
tion, September 1901). The writer has been in-
formed that this is a somewhat painful process, and
that for practical purposes the sealing of a suitable
germicide in the tooth for from twenty-four hours
to a few days will give sufficiently good results.
For many years the writer has been in the
habit of sealing up a paste of tannin, carbolic acid,
and oil of cloves in cavities, preparatory to filling
them, because he found that this dried up and
hardened a layer of soft dentine that he might
not desire to remove from the floor of a cavity,
and that this treatment rendered teeth less liable
to shocks from thermal change after they were
filled. There has been much discussion as to
whether any softened dentine should be left in
a cavity or not, and some of the most advanced
dentists of the modern school insist on its complete
removal, no matter whether this exposes the pulp or
not. The writer finds, as the result of twenty years'
observation, that the drastic removal of the whole of
the softened dentine from the floors of cavities
would lead to pulp exposure in the majority of
cases, and as this would necessarily entail pulp
destruction, pulp removal, and root filling, with all