Seventy‐two dogs of 27 breeds were ovariec‐tomised and followed for six years minimum. Trie technique used was a bilateral surgical flank approach, removing the ovaries and leaving the uterus in situ. The main technical advantages of the technique are the better ovarian exposure, the possible deep placement of the ligatures and the small incisions. The disadvantages are the need to turn the animal, to redrape it and the difficulty in finding the ovarian bursa in some animals as well as the difficulty of removing the uterus when necessary. Post surgical complications were minimal and consisted mainly of seroma formation in 16 dogs (26 per cent) for a maximum of two weeks. In the long term the major complications were weight gain (60 per cent), excessive hair shedding (26 per cent), aggressiveness towards other dogs (22 per cent), sedentary behaviour (29 per cent) and urinary incontinence (18 per cent). The latter started approximately 1–5 years after surgery and occurred periodically in one half and continuously in the other half of the dogs. Over the mean 10 years follow‐up period no cases of pyometra occurred.

We describe 2 sibs with multiple congenital anomalies. The main manifestations include hypoplasia of the corpus callosum and/or cerebellar hypoplasia, Robin sequence, pharyngeal and laryngeal hypoplasia, abnormal ears, excessive neck skin, cardiac defect, and Hirschsprung disease. The presence in 2 sibs born to healthy, consanguineous parents suggests autosomal recessive inheritance. These anomalies must have arisen during blastogenesis; the syndrome resembles most the condition described in 1988 by Toriello and Carey.

A new procedure based on scanning ion microprobe mass analysis (SIMS) is developed to characterize populations of silver halide microcrystals present in a photographic emulsion with emphasis on the thickness distribution of the surface layers usually found on these microcrystals in the 5−30 nm range. Using a Cameca IMS-4f instrument one is able to image the lateral and in-depth distributions of the halides in individual microcrystals. A digital image processing system interfaced with the SIMS instrument permits the acquisition of spatially resolved mass-selected data (ion images) for a number of single microcrystals. Small regions (∼300 nm in diameter) within each crystal are selected a posteriori for local area “retro” depth profiling by computer reconstruction. By averaging the gray values measured in suitable parts of the crystal, the thickness of the surface layers can be determined, allowing one to make a three-dimensional reconstruction of the chemical composition of the microcrystals. Using this methodology, the characteristics (thickness and chemical composition) of surface and subsurface layers of different samples can be compared and subclasses in one population can be detected. With the aid of home-developed hardware and software, the image acquisition procedure was automated, making it possible to automatically measure a sufficiently large number of microcrystals. In this way the analysis time was decreased and the statistical relevance of the data improved. Two examples are given which illustrate the power and practical use of the developed methodology.

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