THE TEETH OF THE COMING MAN. 817 



excitation, encouragement, and opportunity for development, in the 

 lack of which their usefulness •will be impaired for life ; that some 

 children are endowed with great capacity in this direction, while they 

 have but little in any other ; that the happiness of every family may 

 be promoted by the disposition and ability on the part of its various 

 members to adapt the material resources within their control to the 

 convenience and comfort of all ; that by the cultivation in early child- 

 hood of a taste for manual employment there would be found in al- 

 most every individual aptitudes for hand-work of one kind or another, 

 which would afford pleasurable pursuits in hours not occupied with 

 the serious affairs of life, and which would contribute to his happi- 

 ness as well as promote his pecuniary welfare ; that such occupations, 

 aside from the main pursuits of life, would aid in forming good habits 

 and good morals ; that the children of the poor especially need some- 

 thing to occupy their time and attention out of school-hours, whereby 

 they may be withdrawn from the demoralizing influences of the streets ; 

 that it will be wise for this Association to promote the home mdustries 

 of children by all means in their power, one of the most effective being 

 public exhibitions, where a comparison of the results of the industries 

 of the children may be made ; that by such exhibitions we shall not 

 only educate the child-contributors, but that they will also educate us 

 and the community. 



THE TEETH OF THE COMmG MAN* 



Br OSCAE SCHMIDT. 



THE alternative as to whether man was created or developed can 

 no longer be raised, now that we are exercising the free use of 

 our reason. Man's dentition has to be judged from our experiences 

 made in the mammalian group. Hence, first of all, it is a reduced 

 dentition. True, we do not know the definite stages by which it was 

 attained in man, any more than we do in the case of the anthropomor- 

 phoids, and all the other apes of the Old World, but we shall not hesi- 

 tate to maintain that the ancestors of man possessed a fuller number 

 of teeth, as long as deductions are justified from the observation of 

 facts. Our teeth have decreased in number during the course of our 

 geologico-zoijlogical development ; we have lost on either side, above 

 and below, two incisors, two premolars, and one molar. By this we 

 transfer ourselves back to those periods from which the jaw of the 

 otocyon has been preserved. Baume, our eminent odontologist, in a 

 recent work which we have repeatedly referred to, has successfully 

 followed and pointed out cases of atavism or reversion in the human 



* From " The Mammalia in their Relation to Primeval Times." Bj Oscar Schmidt. 

 Xew York: D. Appleton & Co., 1886. 

 TOL. XXTIII. — 52 



