Alaska sentinel., 1908-09-10
TALES TOLD BY TEETH.
Remarkable Facts About the Incis- ors of Men and Animals.

| ors of Men and Animals.
 Teeth are not bones, as most people imagine them to be. Though they are attached to the skeleton, they are not a part of 1t. They develop from the iermis, or skin. and are, as a rule. made up of three ubstances-"dentine," zee ment" and enamel" says London An swers.
 Enamel is the hardest of all animal substances. It actually contains more tfan 96 parts in 100 of mineral matter mainly phosphate of lime-while bone contains only 60 per cent This ac- counts for the fact that teeth are more | ndestructible than any other part of animal frame.
 What Is more wonderful still Is that the tooth is the keynote of the frame. An expert anatomlst needs only to be shown a tooth or two In order to re construct from them the animal from whose jaw they originally came-and this although the animal itself has been dead ten million years. and its kind ex- l tinct for almost as long.
 Not only do the teeth show what their owner looked like, whether 1t was animal, lizard. fish or bird-some ex- 1 tinct birds used to possess teeth-but study of a set of these useful organs will show what the creature used to feed on, and. incidentally, tell great deal about Its life and habits.
 Teeth vary in form and number more than any other animal organs. An ele- phant, for instance, has usually only 1 fourth teeth In use besides his tusks But they are big enough to make up in size what they lack in number. The | teeth of the elephant tribe are so diff l ferent from those of other animals that, when a fossil is dug up, the geologist can at a once be certain to what race of creatures Is belonged, and is able to re- construct the gigantic mastodon, or hairy mammoth, in whose jaw 1t orig inally grew.
 At the other end of the scale In point of number of teeth, comes the snail. The common garden snail is the happy pos sessor of 135 rows each of 105 teeth, or matter of 14,115 teeth in all. 1 The teeth of fish vary more greatly l than those of any other known crea- lures. Their teeth are not divided into incisors, canines and molars, as h an- imals but almost every different kind of fish has differently shaped teeth. Sharks for instance, have several rows of teeth, all extremely disappointed. The front row stands up erect, but those behind are more or less recumhent. There is never any difficulty In identi. flying a sharks tooth.
 l Most fish have a great number of teeth. The dolphin, for instance, 7os- sesses 200, but there are others-llke the sturgeon-which have no teeth at all Almost all fish-sharks espe ,ially shed their teeth frequently and grow new ones to replace them.
 Snakes teeth-the poison-fangs. that ] is-have the same pecuiarity. There are always fresh ones in reserve to take l the place of those which get broken. A rattlesnake may have as many as ten of these reserve teeth. Snakes fangs are very sharp. very elastic, and, con trary to common belief, never hollow, but provided with groove, along which the poison flies.
 The sharp tusks of the crocodile and all fesh-eating lizards need only to be seen once to be easily identified after ward. Some reptiles are toothless. These are tortoises, turtles and tolds. A frog may easily be distinguished from toad by the fact that the latter has no teeth while the former has teeth In the upper jaw, but none in the lower.