Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1930-06-29


You'd learn to get on with the new adorn-
ment of course. Especially if all your neighbors
were becoming similarly decorated and nobody
poked fun at you for looking that way. Some
of us get used to having mighty queer-lookling
faces legs or feet, as it is.
Fortunately, We of the human race have not
had to do much of that sort of thing. We do
have some troubles with organs and parts Of
ourselves that seem to have degenerated in the
course of evolution, like wisdom teeth and
our appendices but nothing seems to have gone
on a rampage of embarrassing over-growth.
But if we look about us at the world OF AMI.
mails, we can see after case where changes
of that kind seem to have taken place beyond
any need Of them There are hundreds, even
thousands Of species in all classes OF the animal
kingdom that have teeth or horns, or wings, or
feathers, or scales. or hair that can't be called
anything but simply overgrowa.
And yet the animals aAected get along
all right and even find for these strangely
overdeveloped organs. The elephant, to choose
one of the most extreme cases at the outset,
has had terrible trouble with his eyeteeth
through all the ages. Now they are longer
than his legs. Yet he gets along all right He
has got past the barrier these overgrown eye
teeth put between himself and his food BY
growing his nose into an extra arm and hand.
And the teeth themselves he has learned how to
use as helpful tools in grubbing up things and
as formidable weapons.
Yet there can hardly be a question but that
at the outset the elephant didn't really want
his tusks. They were, in sense, wished on
him. The aboriginal elephant stock, the
strange small animals from which elephants
have descended, did not have big tusks.
Somewhat overdeveloped eyeteeth would be
very useful, as the moderate tusks of pigs still
are The trouble with the elephants ancestor
that once the tusks got going they appar-
emily didn't know when to quit and they even-
tually developed into the tremendous tusks car
ied hv Nnann1OthS.
IT'S queer how the eyeteeth like to do that
sort of thing in all kinds of unrelated ami
mails The male walrus grows wicked prong
of ivory too The walrus' upper eyeteeth didn't
turn forward as the elephants did, but they are
disproportionately long, just the same. The
walrus like the elephant, has learned to make
use of his tusks. He grubs for shellfish on
the bottom Of the bay, and he can use them
with telling effect in fight. But for all that,
you are left with the very distinct feeling that
he got the things somehow and had to find
q use for them afterward.
Then there is the case of the wild hogs. There
are many species of wild swine in the world,
but they all tend to develop pronounced tlSks.
The ones sported by the European wild boar are
of moderate size and undoubted usefulness.
They haven't got out Of bounds. But the tslsks
Of some Of the tropical species in the Orient
reach fearful and wonderful lengths. There is,
in especial, the Babiroussa. In this species the
upper t,lsks Of the male animal are turned back
upon themselves. They grow upward through
the top Of the snout, and then sweep backward
In wide curve, IN some extreme cases reach
ing down again and touching the beasts fore
head-even growing into it. Obviously, such
tusks have lost their value as either tools or
weapons
DUT teeth are by no means the only part of
the body that can run wild once they start.
Horns are even more given to unwieldy lengths
and bizarre growth. walk through the Afri-
can mammal section Of any zoo or museum
leaves you with the impression that the whole
antelope tribe has inherited like an ancestral
curse, an overload of horn. And whole Sec
Uons Of deer and sheep families, too, have been