IRREGULARITIES IN DENTITION. 491 



one of the permanent incisors of the upper jaw did not come 

 down before the fourteenth year. Borelli reports a woman in 

 her sixtieth year who never had teeth; a magistrate of Frede- 

 rickstadt lived to an advanced age, and never had either canine 

 or incisor teeth; he was however furnished with molares. 



The teeth are sometimes supernumerary; it is not very un- 

 common to see this manifested by a single canine or incisor, 

 and more frequently in the upper jaw than in the lower. Occa- 

 sionally, there are several supernumerary teeth. 



Cases are recorded in which several teeth have been fused or 

 joined together. Bernard Gengha reports, that in a pile of bones 

 belonging to the Hospital S. Esprit, at Rome, he found a cra- 

 nium in which there were only three teeth; in the two upper 

 maxillse one occupied the space of all the incisors and the two 

 cuspidati, and each of the others the space of all the molares of 

 its respective side.* According to the historians Plutarch and 

 Valerius Maximus; Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, and Prusias, king 

 of Bithynia, had a single dental piece in each jaw, which stood 

 in the place of the usual allowance of sixteen teeth. These, 

 cases are scarcely credible, for the reason, that for them to 

 have occurred, the middle palate suture, which is slow inform- 

 ing, and divides the germs of the two sides from each other, 

 could not have existed during the foetal state, at any time sub- 

 sequent to the third month; or what is more compatible with 

 this account, at, no time whatever. It is more probable, there- 

 fore, that notwithstanding the royal opportunities of cleanliness 

 possessed by these persons, their teeth were neglected, and per- 

 mitted to incrust themselves with a dense, thick coat of tartar, 

 which gave them the appearance of a single piece: a circum- 

 stance which occurred to Sabatier, in a girl of fifteen or six- 

 teen, and to Fournier in an individual of the same ageandsex.t 

 Another objection is, that as the common law of the germs is 

 to develop themselves, and to ossify at different epochs, in these 

 two cases they were all not only proceeding at the same rate, but 

 also joining one another so as to form but a common sac, con- 

 founding, thereby, all the known phenomena of dentition. 



In most persons there are but two. sets of teeth; it .has hap- 

 pened, however, in several instances, for people about the age of 

 seventy to have one or more new teeth belonging to a third set: 



* Sabatier, Anat. tome 1, p. 78. f Diet, des Sc. Med. 



