z66 VEGETARIANS AND THEIR TEETH 



Experiments on a large and decisive scale in regard to 

 the value of the different foods taken by man and the 

 question of the desirability of cooked meat as part of his 

 diet have never been carried out, nor has the use of alcohol 

 been studied by direct experimental method on a large 

 scale. - Inasmuch as the feeding of our Army and Navy, 

 of prisoners, lunatics, and paupers, is the business of the 

 State, it is obviously the duty of the Government to inves- 

 tigate this matter and arrive at a decision. It can be done 

 by the Government, and only by the Government. The 

 Army Medical Department is fully capable, and, I am told, 

 desirous, of undertaking this investigation. Five hundred 

 soldiers in barracks would find it no hardship, but an 

 agreeable duty (if rewarded in a suitable way), to submit 

 to various diets, and to comparative tests of the value of 

 such diets. There would be no difficulty in arranging the 

 experimental investigation. Fifty years ago similar work 

 (but not precisely in regard to the questions now raised) 

 was done by the Army Medical Department, under Parkes, 

 with most valuable and widely recognised results. 



Plate VII. — The series of teeth in the upper (i) and lower jaw (2) of a 

 modern European (natural size). The teeth are placed closely side 

 by side without a gap — an arrangement which does not occur in the apes 

 nor in any other living mammal, although it is found in some extinct 

 herbivores — the Anoplotherium and the Arsinoitherium. The shape of 

 the arch formed by the row of teeth should be compared with that 

 shown by the same arch in the Gibbon {PI.VIIl). The crowns of the teeth 

 are very carefully drawn in this figure, which is from a plate published 

 by Professor Selenka. 



It must be noted that the number of tubercles on the true molars 

 may be in exceptional cases one more or one less than that given 

 in this drawing whirh gives the most usual number. The word 

 " molar " is often used to include the five cheek teeth on each side 

 of each jaw, but more strictly the anterior bicuspid teeth are called 

 ■' pre-molars," and the three larger teeth behind them, which have no 

 predecessors or representatives in the first or milk dentition, are called 

 true molars or simply " molars " — a rule we have followed here. 



