58 ON THE MODE IN WHICH :srUSKET-BULLETS BECOME 



Camper, in the BescrijHion Anatomique d'un Elephant 

 Male, remarks that it is uot unusual to see foreign bodies in- 

 closed, or as it were soldered, into the substance of the ivory. 

 The same anatomist also figures and describes a bullet which 

 was inclosed in a very irregular mass of ivory, covered with 

 long appendages, which were directed parallel to the axis of 

 the tusk. The metallic bodies in question, he remarks, must 

 have penetrated across the alveolus into the hollow of the 

 tusk, and must have remained for a long time in the substance 

 of the pulpy flesh which fills that cavity, because the ivory 

 enveloped them on all sides, and would at length have carried 

 them beyond the alveolus by the increase of the tooth. He 

 supposes that the nodules which are formed around the balls 

 and the very incomplete union of their fibres with the soimd 

 ivory, add weight to this conjecture. Euysch, in his X. The- 

 saurus, Plate II., figures brass and iron bullets inclosed in 

 isolated nodules of irregular iyory. 



Blumenbach considers the tusks of the elephant to differ 

 from other teeth, more particularly in the remarkable patho- 

 logical phenomenon of bullets, with which the animal has 

 been shot, being found, on sawing through the tusk, imbedded 

 in its substance in a peculiar manner. He looks upon this 

 fact as important in reference to the doctrine of a " nutritio 

 ultra vasa." He mentions a tusk, equal in size to a man's 

 thigh, in which an unflattened leaden bullet lay close to the 

 cavity of the tooth, surrounded by a peculiar covering, and 

 the entrance from without closed as it were by a cicatrix. 

 From these facts Blumenbach concludes that the elephant's 

 tusk, when fractured or perforated, can pour out an ossific 

 juice to repair the injury. 



Mr. Lawrence, in his notes to Blumenbach's Comparative 

 Anatomy, overlooking these cases (one of which is given in 

 the text of his author) in which cicatrices have been seen 

 filhng up the orifices produced by balls, explains satisfactorily 



