In speaking of extraction of the teeth,[430] Fauchard begins by saying that the milk teeth, although destined to be shed, should never be extracted, except in cases of absolute necessity, as, for instance, when being decayed, they give rise to intolerable pain. The alveoli of the infantile jaw are weak, whilst the roots of the deciduous teeth are sometimes firmer and more solid than one would believe, and hence it is that in extracting a milk tooth one runs the risk of injuring the alveolus and even of carrying away a portion of it altogether with the tooth, not to speak of the danger of damaging or even destroying the germ of the permanent tooth lying below. Besides, Fauchard adds, there are sometimes deciduous teeth that are never shed and never renewed. One must, therefore, defer drawing children’s teeth as long as possible unless they are loose. When, however, intolerance of pain or a caries endangering the integrity of the neighboring teeth oblige one to recur without delay to extraction, one should carry out the operation with prudence and judgment, so as to avoid the dangers alluded to. It sometimes happens, says Fauchard, that one finds in children a crooked tooth by the side of a straight one; in these cases ignorant tooth-drawers have often been known to remove the crooked (permanent) tooth, and to leave the straight, viz., the deciduous one, which afterward falls of itself, the individual thus remaining deprived of one of his teeth for the rest of his life. The rule to be observed in order to avoid a similar error is always to extract the older of the two teeth and to leave the one that has been cut more recently, which is easily recognized by its being ordinarily firmer in the socket and of a better color than the first. And here the author inveighs against all the charlatans of his day who dared, without being dentists, to perform dental operations, and whose number, it would seem, was ever increasing, so much so that he is led to exclaim: “There will shortly be more dentists than persons affected with dental diseases!” In proof of this he relates the case of a cutler of Paris, who extracted the molar tooth of a young girl because black spots having appeared on it, he believed it to be decayed; but perceiving that he had only removed the crown (it was a deciduous tooth about to fall out), and thinking that he had broken the tooth, proceeded to extract the root, removing, in his gross ignorance, the permanent tooth on the point of coming through.