42 THE NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [6:2-Fei>.. isio 



a little extra bother now. Dentists hurt too much, and they 

 cost too much, and they cost a lot, too; so a good set of teeth, 

 not just now, but all our lives, and no bother with dentists— 

 that's as good as a lot of money in the bank. Every time we 

 brush our teeth we may be saving a dollar and a "holler" at the 

 ■dentist's. Anyhow, let's see. 



Dogs don't have to brush their teeth, and they seem to have 

 pretty good ones. Why do we have to brush ours? That's not 

 a very easy question to answer, but there's an answer all the 

 same. If we ate the same things a dog eats, chewed bones and 

 all that, perhaps we wouldn't have to brush our teeth either. 

 Away back there, ages and ages ago, before tooth-brushes and 

 dentists and false teeth were invented, there were boys and girls 

 all right. What about their teeth? Did they get holes in them, 

 and have toothache, and go howling around the caves their 

 fathers lived in till they got smacked to make them keep still? 

 Perhaps not. For in those days the boys gnawed on bones the 

 way dogs do now, and cracked nuts the way squirrels do, and 

 their teeth were harder than our teeth are now; so they didn't 

 get holes in their teeth and have to go to dentists to have the 

 holes filled. And so the teeth didn't decay and fall out. 



But it's very different now. For a long, long time boys 

 and girls haven't been brought up on bones and hard nuts. 

 More likely you were brought up on mush and milk, and don't 

 get anything harder to chew than a piece of tough meat. 



All right, then, let's just go out and chew bones and bite 

 nuts. That will be more fun than tooth-brushing, anyhow. Yes. 

 but you can't do it that way now. It's too late. You see you 

 and your grandfathers and all their great-great grandfathers 

 have been leaving bones and nuts alone for so long that now 

 your teeth are soft to begin with, and you'll only hurt yourself 

 and perhaps break your teeth by trying to do now what that 

 little cave boy did so easily long long ago. 



So we just can't get out of it. If we are going on living in 

 houses instead of caves, and going on eating the good things at 

 home instead of what dogs and squirrels eat, why, we have just 

 got to brush our teeth and keep brushing them every day un- 

 less we want to wind up with forty-seven different kinds of 

 tooth-aches, and a set of false teeth to finish up with. 



Out in San Francisco there is a fine old man who goes up 

 and down the clocks where the ships tie up that come in from 



