The author, therefore, advises lancing the gums deeply, just above the tooth which ought to appear, thus opening it a way, that it may more easily come out. He relates that he has performed this operation on his own children in the presence of many medical authorities. Almost as if to show the high value of this operative procedure, Paré tells the case of a child, the son of the Duke of Nevers, who died at the age of about eight months without having cut any teeth. He, together with other doctors, was invited to carry out an autopsy. No lesion whatever was found sufficient to cause death, but the gums were very hard, thick, and swollen; an incision into them showed that the teeth were ready to come out, if only their eruption had been facilitated by lancing at the right time. Paré and the other doctors were of the unanimous opinion that death was caused solely by the impossibility of cutting the teeth on account of the hardness of the gums. Among the many strange cases given in Book XIX (_Des monstres et prodiges_), Paré also speaks—trusting to the word of Alexander Benedetti—of the case of a woman, who, after the complete loss of her teeth caused by age, cut them all again at eighty years of age. Although Paré treats so amply and with such competence all that concerns dental diseases and their cure, he does not make the least allusion to the stopping of teeth, beyond recommending, as had already been done by Celsus, that when a tooth that is to be extracted shows a large cavity, the latter should be well filled with linen or lead, so that the tooth be not fractured under the pressure of the instrument and so leave the root behind in the alveolus. A century before Ambroise Paré, Giovanni d’Arcoli had already mentioned the filling of teeth with gold leaf, and, as we have seen already, there is very good reason to believe that the practice of this operation dated back to a still earlier period. How is it, then, that the illustrious French surgeon does not say a word about this? Very probably stoppings were not at all in use among French _dentateurs_ and perhaps, even in Italy, this operation was only rarely carried out. JACQUES HOULLIER (1498 to 1562), a celebrated French physician and surgeon, also known under the Latinized name of Jacobus Hollerius, was the first to stand out, although timidly, against the theory of dental worms. He did not decidedly deny their existence, this having been affirmed by so many illustrious writers; he, however, speaks of them as if the point were a doubtful one: “_It is said_ that worms are generated in the teeth, which corrode the teeth themselves, and produce a pain which is not very violent and causes itching with little or no salivation (_vermes ajunt subnasci dentibus, et hos corrodere, à quibus dolor non ita fortis, pruriginosus, nulla aut pauca salivatio_).”