Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/133

 THE TEETH.

What beauty is there in a smile, unless it discloses two symmetrical rows of

"Delicate, little, pearl-white wedges, All transparent at the edges?"

There is no excuse in our day, when dental surgery is practised with such signal success, for marring the pleasure of the beholder by their absence. Bad teeth do worse than this. They cause foul breath, they give rise to wrinkles and falling in of the cheeks, they excite atrocious neuralgias, they disturb the digestion, disorder the sight, and not unfrequently deprave the whole system. It is the first precept of health and beauty to put them in the best order, and to keep them so.

This branch of cosmetic medicine has been so thoroughly studied, and is exclusively practised by such scientific and capable men in all our large cities, that we shall say nothing about the means adopted to repair, or to extract, or to manufacture, or to allay pain in teeth, but confine ourselves wholly to their preservation.

To begin at the beginning, the child during teething should be surrounded by those precautions with regard to diet, etc., which pertain to the hygiene of infancy, and which need not be rehearsed here. The permanent teeth commence to appear at the age of