Excerpt from Transactions of the Illinois State Dental Society: At the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting, Held at Chicago, May 9 to 12, 1899 The year which we round out today has shown very little advancement in the art of filling teeth. And it may be said that dentistry was only one of the many activities which were stunned into inaction during the last twelve months by the intrusion of that dreadful monster, war. The art of healing is an art of peace, and it stands still and languishes when war's alarms are sounded and when man is at strife with his fellow man. The greatest advance during the year seems to have been made in prosthetic and in crown and bridge work, and'in therapeutics. The steadily increasing attention given to bridge work incites me to make right here a strong plea for the more conservative treatment of the natural tooth crown. The improved methods of devitalization of the pulp and the filling of the pulp canal, and the comparative ease of crowning, have doubtless been the cause of the destruction of thousands of natural tooth crowns that might better have been filled and saved for many years of usefulness. A better knowledge of alloys and the combinations of differ ent metals for that purpose have, of late, attracted considerable attention. These helpful improvements are, as we know, the direct outcome of the researches of our honored confr'ere, Dr. G. V. Black. The makers of alloys have taken advantage of the results of these investigations, and as a consequence have given us a much better alloy than we have heretofore used. We all must acknowledge with gratitude the improved meth ods of teaching in nearly all of our dental schools. The profession at large is under a deep debt of gratitude to our teachers of tech nique for the wonderful advance they have made in their special field of labor. The enthusiasm with which they present their cause, coupled with their healthy discontent with present attainments augurs well for the future. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.