Cobbs Anatomy | Page 9

is said to be pushing a law requiring all children to be born with overalls on; but teeth is the subject which we are now discussing. This absence of teeth tends to give the very young of our species the appearance in the face of an old fashioned buckskin purse with the draw string broken, but be that as it may, we are generally fairly well content with life until the teeth begin to come.
First there are the milk teeth. Right there our troubles start. To use the term commonly in use, we cut them, although as a matter of fact, they cut us--cut them with the aid of some such mussy thing as a toothing ring or the horny part of the nurse's thumb, or the reverse side of a spoon--cut them at the cost of infinite suffering, not only for ourselves but for everybody else in the vicinity. And about the time we get the last one in we begin to lose the first one out. They go one at a time, by falling out, or by being yanked out, or by coming out of their own accord when we eat molasses taffy. They were merely what you might call our Entered Apprentice teeth. We go in now for the full thirty-two degrees--one degree for each tooth and thirty-two teeth to a set. By arduous and painful processes, stretching over a period of years, we get our regular teeth--the others were only volunteers-- concluding with the wisdom teeth, as so called, but it is a misnomer, because there never is room for them and they have to stand up in the back row and they usually arrive with holes in them, and if we really possessed any wisdom we would figure out some way of abolishing them altogether. They come late and crowd their way in and push the other teeth out of line and so we go about for months with the top of our mouths filled with braces and wires and things, so that when we breathe hard we sob and croon inside of ourselves like an Aeolean harp.
But in any event we get them all and no sooner do we get them than we begin to lose them. They develop cavities and aches and extra roots and we spend a good part of our lives and most of our substance with the dentist. Nevertheless, in spite of all we can do and all he can do, we keep on losing them. And after awhile, they are all gone and our face folds up on us like a crush hat or a concertina and from our brow to our chin we don't look much more than a third as long as we used to look. We dislike this folded-up appearance naturally--who wouldn't? And we get tired of living on spoon victuals and the memory of past beef-steaks. So we go and get some false ones made. They have to be made to order; there appears to be no market for custom made teeth; you never see any hand-me-down teeth advertised, guaranteed to fit any face and withstand a damp climate. Getting them made to order is a long and unhappy process and I will pass over it briefly. Having got them, we find that they do not fit us or that we do not fit them, which comes to the same thing. The dentist makes them fit by altering us some and the teeth some, and after some months they quit feeling as though they didn't belong to us but had been borrowed temporarily from somebody's loan collection of ceramics.
But just about the time they are becoming acclimated and we are getting used to them, the interior of our mouth for private reasons best known to itself changes around materially and we either have to go back and start all over and go through the whole thing again, or else haply we die and pass on to the bourne from which no traveller returneth either with his teeth or without them. If Shakespeare had only thought of it--and he did think of a number of things from time to time--he might have divided his Seven Ages of Man much better by making them the Seven Ages of Teeth as follows: First age--no tooth; second age--milk teeth; third age-- losing 'em; fourth age--getting more teeth; fifth age--losing 'em; sixth age--getting false teeth and finding they aren't satisfactory; seventh age--toothless again.
I knew a man once who was a gunsmith and lost all his teeth at a comparatively early age. He went along that way for years. He had to eschew the tenderloin for the reason that he couldn't chew it, and he had to cut out hickory nut cake and corn on the ear and such things. But