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METHODS OF FILLING TEETH.
84

or to their arrangement in the jaws, however, cannot be claimed,
because the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and other members of the ape
have similar to that of man, and caries is so
family jaws practically yet
rare with them that a jaw with the teeth showing it is a curiosity to be
and in the case of a museum.
preserved placed glass
The probability is that man suffers because he cooks his food, for
we find that where we take animals unaccustomed to such diet, and
domesticate them, feeding them upon our style of food, they fre-
suffer from caries. The then arises, Shall we alter
quently question
the shape of a tooth which has been attacked ? Shall we depart from
the standard set up by Nature, because of the fact that we do not eat
the kind of food for which we were designed? If we examine the
dog, we discover that with his pointed teeth, although he eats from
our table, he suffers very rarely from caries. Shall we decide from
this that we may file the human tooth into an approximation of a cone,
such that the of the remove the
producing spacing tip tongue may
refuse food from between the teeth? This is a serious question;
as the of this was once
especially production V-shaped spacing strongly
advocated, and largely practiced. It is indeed the custom of some
dentists to-day, and it may come up again within a few years, just as
many other discarded practices have been rediscovered, and taught
and adopted, till their mischievous results once more condemned them
to oblivion.
The V-shaped space will succeed in the human mouth, only when the
gum of the human individual approximates in density that which we
find in the mouth of the dog. In man the teeth occlude squarely, the
one the other. We our food between enamel-surfaces.
against grind
With the dog, except in the incisive region, the teeth pass between
one another, and bite the This is com-
against gum itself. gum-tissue
paratively thin, and supported below by a dense alveolus. Such a
thing as an inflammation, or hypertrophy, in this region is unknown.
I have seen alveolaris in the mouth of a but that was
pyorrhea dog,
in the incisive region. How is it with man? The gum-tissue is
arranged in a very different manner. We find between all the teeth
a pedicle extending toward the incisive edges. This pedicle is the
thickest part of the soft tissue, and therefore least able to withstand
irritation from pressure. Any attempt to chew upon it will result in
disease. In the normal mouth it is protected by the approximation of
the adjacent teeth, which by touching each other are expected to pre-
vent food from passing between the teeth, and impinging upon the
gingiva. I argue therefore that we cannot allow ourselves to copy the
dog, because while we may give man the dog-shaped tooth, we cannot
gum-tissue between the teeth, which will with-
assure him a resistant
stand the crowding offood against it, as occurs with the lower animal.^