164 COGSWELL ON THE HUMAN TEETH. 



degrees ; and finding causes for defects, let us endeavour to remedy 

 if possible these deficiencies. How true are the words of 

 Shakespeare : — 



"If all design begun on earth below 

 Fail in the promised largeness, checks and disorders, 

 Grow in our veins of action higher reared, 

 As knots — by the conflux of meeting sap — 

 Infect the sound pine and divert his grain, 

 Tortive and errant, from his course of growth." 



Is there a possibility of assisting in any way to overcome this 

 deficiency in the physical organization ? If so is it not the duty 

 of every parent and guardian to look at natural causes and effe- 's? 

 If the soil is not supplied with proper fertilizers it cannot yield 

 its full return. So with the animal economy : it avails itself of 

 the nutrition required by the peculiar vital principle, acting wi:!)in 

 and upon each constitution. It appropriates no. more and no less 

 than the vital principle stimulating the organs will permit, and, if 

 an insufficiency of hone forniing raaterial be not taken into the 

 system by the food, imperfect developement must be and is the 

 result in the human organization. 



We will also find that so long as the constitutions of men differ 

 from each other, so will there be the same great variety in the 

 physical character and pathological condition of the dentive organs. 

 The blood which is the fluid source from which the teeth, bones, 

 tendons, muscles, nerves, life, hair, membranes, in fact the 

 whole organized body are metamorphosed, so wonderfully adapted 

 for each that the mind fails to comprehend how these arrangements 

 are performed. Still we recognize the fact that blood is the life of 

 man, pure or impure. 



It has been a subject of some discussion for some time, whether 

 the administering of phosphates in various forms as extracts, acts 

 in the same way upon the physical organization as food containing 

 the same. 



We all will admit, however, it is far preferable to take food as 

 niedicine when made palatable than in some of the comjxninds often 

 administered, either homeopathic or allopathic. While many may 

 be palatable, still the fact of one h^mg food and the other medicine^ 

 acts at least upon the imagination if not upon the body. The in- 



