2 68 Journal of Travel and Natural History 



or according to no law. It is true that Nature sometimes takes 

 strange liberties, refusing to be bound by the strict rules to 

 which our ideas of homological propriety would confine her ; and 

 our knowledge of teeth and their developments is still anything 

 but satisfactory. Unaccountable, or rather unaccounted for, mon- 

 strosities are preserved in bottles in surgical museums, where teeth 

 appear in strange and unwonted places, and extraordinary variations 

 in the dentition of otherwise perfectly normal individuals occur. 

 Falconer, for example, figures (Palseont. Mem., vol. ii., pi. 21) the 

 right lower ramus of a rhinoceros jaw, which possesses two pre- 

 molars, four nearly equally worn, for which it has no manner of 

 excuse on the plea of ancestry — and many similar deviations 

 might be collected. Speaking generally, however, there is a place 

 for everything, and the only barrier to our interpreting every de- 

 viation from ordinary rule is our own ignorance of the laws re- 

 gulating them. In the present case we entered on the inquiry with 

 the advantage of being able to identify at least two of the nine 

 tusks (the ordinary tusks), and were thus provided with a starting- 

 point to serve as a guide to determine the character of the rest. 

 Wisely distrusting, however, our own qualifications, we had recourse 

 to the assistance of two experts, to whose judgment all would be 

 likely to defer. Mr Boyd Dawkins and Professor Huxley have 

 carefully considered the sketches and facts, and their opinion is 

 expressed in the following letter from Mr Dawkins (which he al- 

 lows us to print) : — 



"I thank you much for the remarkable sketch, which has a very important 

 bearing on the theory of descent with modification. To go into the matter 

 as it deserves would far exceed the limits of a letter. Before, liowever, 

 I briefly recapitulate what strikes me at sight, I would say that I accept the 

 truth of the story told, after the lapse of six years, by an African hunter, 

 although the Africans, as a rule, beat even the Cretans in lying. The peculiar 

 form of the tusks, and their insertion into the jaw, could not have been the 

 offspring of African shrewdness. There is, however, one point in which the 

 sketch seems to be rather obscure. The large downward and backward cur\'ing 

 tusk c apparently springs from the same alveolar base as the large nonnal 

 tusk b, in the sketch of the right hand side of the head. It is altogether im- 

 possible, so far as we know of the development of teeth, that two tusks of that 

 magnitude could co-exist in the same pre-maxillaiy. Their diverse curvature 

 also would oblige their alveoli to assume a diverse direction. Therefore, I take 

 it that c and b do not belong to the same pre-maxillary, as is shewn in 

 the sketch of the right side, but to the upper and lower jaws, as seems to be 

 represented in the sketch of the similar tusks in the left side of the head. On 

 the assumption of the truth of this inference, the incisive dentition is full of 



