Page 168 - My FlipBook

152 HUNTER ON THE TEETH.
is generally attended with what we call a lisp. People who have
lost all their Teeth, and most old people for that reason, lose, in
a great measure, their voice. This arises partly from the loss
of the Fore Teeth, but principally from the loss of all the
Teeth, and of the Alveolar Processes of both Jaws, by which
means the mouth becomes too small for the tongue, and the
lips and cheeks become flaccid ; insomuch that the nicer move-
ments of these parts, in the articulation of sounds, are ob-
structed ; and thence the words and syllables are indistinctly
pronounced and slurred, or run into one another.

UNDER WHAT CLASS DO THE HUMAN TEETH COME.
Natural historians have been at great pains to prove from the
Teeth, that man is not a carnivorous animal ; but in this, as in
many other things, they have not been accurate in their defini-
tions ; nor have they determined what a carnivorous animal is.
If they mean an animal that catches .and kills his prey with
his Teeth, and eats that flesh of his prey just as it is killed,
they are in the right ; man is not in this sense a carnivorous
animal, and, therefore, he has not Teeth like those of a Lion
;
and this, I presume, is what they mean.
But if their meaning were that the Human Teeth are not
fitted for eating meat that has been catched, killed, and dressed
by art, in all the various ways that the superiority of the
human mind can invent, they are in the wrong. Indeed, from
this confined way of thinking it would be hard to say what the
human Teeth are fitted for ; because, by the same reasoning,
man is not a graminivorous animal, as his Teeth are not fitted
for pulling vegetable food, &c. They are not made like those
of cows or horses, for example.
The light in which we ought to view this subject is, that man
is a more perfect or complicated animal than any other ; and is
not made like others, to come at his food by his Teeth, but by
his hands, directed by his superior ingenuity ; the Teeth being
given only for the purpose of chewing the food, in order to its