Rough Ways Made Smooth: A series of familiar essays on scientific subjectsProctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
Rough Ways Made Smooth: A series of familiar essays on scientific subjects
Proctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
As in the father's case, the inside of Fedor's nostrils
and ears has a thick crop of hair.' 'Both father and son are almost
toothless, Andrian having only five teeth, one in the upper jaw and
four in the lower, while the child has only four teeth, all in the
lower jaw. In both cases the four lower teeth are all incisors. To
the right of Andrian's one upper tooth there still remains the mark
of another which has disappeared. That beyond these six teeth the man
never had any others is evident to anyone who feels the gums with the
finger.'
The deficiency of teeth, accompanied as it is by what is in reality a
deficiency not a redundancy of hair--for Andrian and his son have no
real hair--accords well with Darwin's view, that a constant correlation
exists between hair and teeth. He mentions as an illustration the
deficiency of teeth in hairless dogs. The tusks of the boar, again, are
greatly reduced under domestication, and the reduction is accompanied
by a corresponding diminution of the bristles. He mentions also the
case of Julia Pastrana, a Spanish dancer or opera singer, who had a
thick masculine beard and a hairy forehead, while her teeth were so
redundant that her mouth projected, and her face had a gorilla-like
appearance. It should rather be said that in general those creatures
which present an abnormal development in the covering of their skin,
whether in the way of redundancy or deficiency, present, generally,
perhaps always, an abnormal dental development, as we see in sloths and
armadilloes on the one hand, which have the front teeth deficient, and
in some branches of the whale family on the other, in which the teeth
are redundant either in number or in size. In individual members of the
human family it certainly is not always the case that the development
of the hair and that of the teeth are directly correlated; for some
who are bald when quite young have excellent teeth, and some who have
lost most of their teeth while still on the right side of forty have
excellent hair to an advanced age.[16]
Another case, somewhat similar to that of Andrian and his son, is found
in a Burmese family, living at Ava, and first described by Crawford in
1829. Shwe-Maong, the head of the family, was about thirty years old.
His whole body was covered with silky hairs, which attained a length of
nearly five inches on the shoulders and spine. He had four daughters,
but only one of them resembled him. She was living at Ava in 1855, and,
according to the account given by a British officer who saw her there,
she had a son who was hairy like his grandfather, Shwe-Maong. The case
of this family illustrates rather curiously the relation between the
hair and teeth. For Shwe-Maong retained his milk-teeth till he was
twenty years old (when he attained puberty), and they were replaced by
nine teeth only, five in the upper and four in the lower jaw. Eight of
these were incisors, the ninth (in the upper jaw) being a canine tooth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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