86 ON DENTAL EXOSTOSIS. 



include under this name every known enlarge- 

 ment of the substance of the fang, I must beg 

 your attention to what might otherwise be deemed 

 a digression from our subject. John Hunter calls 

 it, in simple Saxon, a " swelling of the fang, in 

 which," he says, "although the body continues 

 sound, is of that kind that would be called in any 

 other bone spina ventosar This comparison is un- 

 fortunate, since that name is applied to increase in 

 the size of a bone, accompanied by a corresponding 

 excavation within, and is therefore totally in- 

 applicable to exostosis, as he himself correctly 

 describes the body of the tooth to be sound. 

 Fox gives a long chapter on exostosis, in which 

 he details several remarkable cases, and a little 

 further on gives a very meagre and unsatisfactory 

 account of what he is pleased to call spina ventosa, 

 in which he says the fang is hollowed out within, 

 and roughed and enlarged without. The descrip- 

 tion is unaccompanied by any engraving, and 

 answers more to death of the pulp, followed by 

 necrosis of the tooth and its consequences, than 

 to anything to which the term spina ventosa might 

 be applied. 



The proximate cause of this disease is referred, 

 and correctly so, to irritation of the periosteum 

 connecting the fang with its socket; but its 

 remote causes are not always sufficiently obvious to 

 be pointed out with exactness. This irritation is, 

 in the majority of cases, an extension of a similar 



