In the two following chapters,[295] the author speaks in a masterly and admirable manner of the functions of the teeth and of their utility.
Among many other true and interesting observations, he remarks that by the loss of their teeth even the most powerful dogs become cowards.
Besides what concerns the human teeth, excellent notions of comparative anatomy, above all in what regards the monkey, the dog, and the ruminants, are to be found in this little but most precious book of Eustachius.
The teeth, says he, are not equally hard in all animals, and many ancient authors have affirmed that ferocious animals have much harder teeth than tame ones.
Chapter XXIX, relating to dental anomalies, is one of the most interesting. We here quote the greater part of it.
“Some historians relate that Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, Eurifeus, of Greece, and many others, had, instead of teeth, a continuous bone, furrowed by somewhat deep vertical lines, in no way different from what one sees in the multiple molars of the goat. It has never happened to me, says Eustachius, to witness a similar union of all the teeth; I have, however, sometimes observed continuity between three or four molars, precisely in the same manner as in sheep. It also once happened to me to observe in the case of an old man, a fellow citizen of mine, that the teeth were covered up on every side by a hard and almost stony substance, and no longer exhibited any trace of separation, offering instead the appearance of a single bone.”
“One reads that Timarchus, of Cyprus, had two rows or series of teeth and Hercules three.”
The author never had any opportunity of observing any such anomalies; notwithstanding, he refers to cases of the kind observed by other anatomists of his time, and, in a particular manner, to the case of a triple dental series in a youth who died at the age of eighteen. As the truth of the fact was testified to by highly respectable medical men, Eustachius lends faith thereto. “Neither can it be said”—he adds—“that in the case we are speaking of the new teeth erupted from other sockets before the temporary ones were shed, for there would then have been only a double and not a triple series; indeed, the series would not even have been double along all the line, but only along the line of the temporary teeth; and besides this, the double series would not have been maintained up to eighteen years of age—the time of the death of the subject—but only until the shedding of the deciduous teeth.”
“That teeth are sometimes cut in the palate is a fact attested to by Alessandro de Benedetti and others. It has also occurred, within my own experience, to observe this in the person of a Roman woman, who had a tooth in the roof of the mouth, near the opening which is in proximity to the incisors,[296] and at Gubbio there is, in the monastery of the Trinità, a nephew of the distinguished jurisconsult Girolamo Gabrielli, who at the age of eighteen cut a tooth in the middle of the palate.”