He had heard that the famous gold tooth was larger than the others, and that the neighboring molar was wanting; from which he argued that this was simply the case of a tooth the crown of which had been covered with a plate of gold. Answering the arguments of Horst, he accused him of gross ignorance in the most elementary notions of astronomy, and this for having affirmed that when the famous child was born, that is, December 22, the sun happened to be in conjunction with Saturn in the sign of the Ram. As the sun does not enter the sign of the Ram until March, if it had been there on December 22 this would have been a greater portent than if the whole body of the child had been formed of nothing else but teeth of gold![330] The above-mentioned fact is not the only one of its kind. Serres relates that once there was a great noise made in Poland about the pretended golden teeth of another child who was carried round from city to city for the purpose of making money. A Franciscan monk had sought to explain, in one of his writings, the formation of these teeth. The anatomist Kircher answered him in a pamphlet which had the very suitable epigraph: _O præclare pater, nimium ne crede colori_.[331] In fact, the pretended teeth were only covered with a layer of tartar of golden color. As the falsity of the pretended miracle might be brought to light at any moment with much scandal, a bishop thought it well to put an end in haste to the comedy, by ordering the removal of the deceitful layer of tartar from the teeth of the child, to be performed in public, so that the imposture might be made completely clear. From the above story we can, at any rate, deduce an important conclusion for the history of dental art, that is to say, that even as early as 1593 there was an artificer (we do not know whether a goldsmith or dentist) who knew how to construct a gold crown, although only for the purposes of deception. CHAPTER XI. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. The first signs of the separation of dental science from general medicine were to be perceived in the sixteenth century, the period in which, as we have seen, the earliest dental monographs appeared. From that time this separation tended to accentuate itself ever more strongly; dental monographs became more numerous and dentistry progressed ever more rapidly, both in its scientific and practical aspects.