42 goodslk's work complete. 



predecessors. Serres, the octogenarian, who died in 

 January last, and the successor of M. De Blainville, 

 like Goodsir in being the son of a country practitioner, 

 and still more like him in character and work, advanced 

 our knowledge of the embryonic condition of the dental 

 apparatus in his able treatise on the anatomy and phy- 

 siology of the teeth. He described the germs of the 

 two sets of teeth, the membranous folds and partitions, 

 and the relative position of the anterior molar to the 

 canine, and did much to advance our knowledge quoad 

 dentition. Hunter, Baron Cuvier, and his son Fre- 

 derick, Purkinje, Muller, Betzius, Bell, Blake, Owen, 

 and Nasmyth and others laboured at different depart- 

 ments of odontology, confirming in part the researches 

 of Malpighi and Leeuwenhoek, and contributing fresh 

 facts to the accumulating stores; but none of these 

 eminent men gave that attention to the embryonic 

 conditions of the teeth that Goodsir bestowed ; and no 

 one succeeded as he did in furnishing a consecutive 

 and complete account of the whole process of human 

 dentition. His observations were systematically re- 

 corded, and in the most precise way, and this is a great 

 desideratum in anatomical science. 



When Goodsir read his paper to the British Asso- 

 ciation, he believed that most of his facts were new to 

 science, and this was the prevailing opinion at the 

 meeting. In a postscript note (vol. ii. p. 51), Goodsir 

 explains how he became aware of Professor Arnold's 

 discovery of the milk-tooth sacs formed by a duplica- 

 ture of the mucous membrane of the mouth, published 



