By my experience as a practitioner, as a teacher, and in my intercourse with fellow-practitioners, I have become convinced of a serious defect in the teaching of the details of the anatomy of the teeth, and in the systematization of the terms used in their description. This defect has been a constant drawback at the chair, in the laboratory, and most of all, in the college. The object of the present volume is to remedy, in a measure, this defect. To this end I have had constantly in view the needs of the dental student and practitioner.
We have heretofore had excellent general descriptions in human and comparative dental anatomy; but these have dealt principally with the general forms of the dentitions of the mammalia and other orders of animate beings, rather than with specific descriptions of the forms of the various surfaces and surface markings, making up the sum of the forms of the individual teeth of man. Valuable as these works have been, they have left the acquirement of a knowledge of the details of the specific forms of the human teeth mostly to individual observation. By this means, many have attained to an excellent perception of the various forms of the human teeth; but it is not reasonable to suppose the profession generally will do this without some fixed guide. What the dental student wants most in the college, and in the office, is a systematized nomenclature of the several parts of the teeth in detail; and such a description as will call his attention successively to every part of each tooth, as Gray, in his Anatomy, has called attention to every part of each bone, however apparently unimportant.
