Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/826

806  preparations, of bolted flour, and pies and cakes, came a time when the teeth had few offices to perform, and they began to decay for want of employment. To use a labor-phrase, they were "out of work."

The fact that father and mother have poor teeth descends to the children with even more surety than a deficiency of hair. Dentists inform me that fully one half of their youthful patrons never shed their "milk" molars. They remain in the jaws (or on them) until the possessor is from twenty to thirty years of age, and then decay and come out, or are pulled, to make room for "store" teeth. Owing to this habit, many a person who has a good-looking set of canines and incisors is without a single molar. Wisdom-teeth, that come at full maturity and mark the age of manhood and womanhood, are usually short-lived, and frequently show specks of decay as soon as they appear. Mankind do not use teeth, and so the teeth disappear.

Looking at the facts as presented, there can be but one conclusion regarding the coming man. If the present state of things continues, he will be bald-headed and toothless. From all indications, the time when this kind of a coming man will be here is but a few generations away.



FTER the discovery of the Bahama Islands, Columbus writes to Queen Isabella that "this country as far surpasses all other lands in beauty as the day exceeds the night in brilliancy"; and as the scientific expedition of the Johns Hopkins University approached these islands, and the beauties of the land and sea and sky of the tropics began to unfold themselves before our eyes, all the members of our party echoed, in words of their own, the impression of the great explorer.

We had been shut up for nineteen days in a little schooner, smaller than those in which Columbus made his first voyage, in a hold which did not allow us to stand erect, with no floor except a few rough boards laid on the ballast of broken stone. We had found an endless source of pleasure and profit in the examination of the marine animals which drifted by us in the floating sargassum of the Gulf Stream, and we had seen for ourselves what we had so often read, that the ocean is the true home of animal life, and that the life of the land is as 