The first molar cuts the gum at two weeks old, is in full use at three months, and is shed in the course of the second year. The second cuts the gum at about six months, and is shed in the fifth year. The third appears at two years, is in full use about the fifth year, and finally disappears about the ninth year. In the sixth year the fourth breaks from the gum, and lasts till the animal's twenty-fifth year. The fifth cuts the gum at the twentieth year, is entirely exposed soon after the fortieth, and is thrust out about the sixtieth year, by the advance of the sixth molar, which appears at about fifty years old, and probably lasts for half a century more. If others succeed this,—a seventh and even an eighth, as some assert,—these would carry on the Elephant's life to two or three centuries, in accordance with an ancient opinion, which is in some degree countenanced by modern observations.
To come back, then, to the case before us, since the fifth molar has its fore part much worn, and the posterior laminæ scarcely yet protruded from the gum, it follows that this Elephant is now not far from the fortieth year of his life, a deduction which well agrees with the dimensions of his tusks, and his appearance of mature vigour.
Can you detect a flaw in this reasoning? And yet how baseless the conclusion, which assigns a past existence of forty years to a creature called into existence this very day.
X.
PARALLELS AND PRECEDENTS.
(Man.)
"Once, in the flight of ages past,
There lived a Man,—and who was he?
Mortal, howe'er thy lot be cast,
That man resembled thee."—Montgomery.
We have knocked at the doors of the vegetable world, asking our questions; then at those of the lower tribes of the brute creation, and now at those of the higher forms; and we have received but one answer,—varying, indeed, in terms, but essentially the same in meaning,—from all. And now we have one more application to make; we have, still in our ideal peregrination, to seek out the newly-created form of our first progenitor, the primal Head of the Human Race.