Note 15 — Chapter I · DENTAL ART AMONG THE EGYPTIANS.

[The oft-quoted statements of Mr. Purland with reference to Egyptian dental art are recorded in the transactions of the first monthly meeting of the College of Dentists, an extinct English dental association, and published in the Quarterly Journal of Dental Science, 1857, vol. i, p. 49, where the following note by the secretary appears: “Mr. Purland repudiated the idea of the Chinese having been the first to manufacture teeth, and referred to numerous specimens in the British Museum, manufactured between four thousand and five thousand years ago by the Egyptians, who he considered were the original makers. On the subject of flint, Mr. Purland said he had discovered pieces of wood in the centre, and remarked upon the artificial teeth he had found in mummies.”

Again, at page 63 of the same journal, in an article entitled “Dental Memoranda,” by T. Purland, Dentist, Ph.D., the author says:

“Belzoni and others discovered rudely manufactured teeth in the sarcophagi of the Egyptians. As regards the use of gold leaf, Sir Gardner Wilkinson observes, as a singular fact, that the Egyptians stopped teeth with gold.

“It is true that rudely manufactured teeth have been found in the heads of Egyptian mummies, but it is equally true that teeth of a very superior make and adaptation have also been found, some carved in ivory, others in sycamore wood, and some have been found fixed upon gold plates. Of these varieties, some are deposited in the valuable and extensive museum belonging to Joseph Mayer, Esq., F.S.A., of Liverpool; others are in the museums of Berlin and Paris, and I am in possession of a tooth found pivoted to a stump in the head of a mummy in the collection of a lamented friend.

“Of stopping with gold, several instances have come to my notice, particularly in a mummy in the Salt collection, sold by Sotheby, in 1836, in which three teeth had been stopped. I have endeavored to trace the mummy, but in vain.”—E. C. K.]