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. The explanation of this latter arrangement is as follows.
The strength of such an animal is in its teeth, and these depend for
their efficiency on their sharpness. In order, then, to prevent
their getting blunted by mutual friction, such of them as serve for
weapons fit into each other's interspaces, and are so kept in proper
condition. No animal that has sharp interfitting teeth is at the
same time furnished with tusks. For nature never makes anything
superfluous or in vain. She gives, therefore, tusks to such animals as
strike in fighting, and serrated teeth to such as bite. Sows, for
instance, have no tusks, and accordingly sows bite instead of
striking.
A general principle must here be noted, which will be found
applicable not only in this instance but in many others that will
occur later on. Nature allots each weapon, offensive and defensive
alike, to those animals alone that can use it; or, if not to them
alone, to them in a more marked degree; and she allots it in its
most perfect state to those that can use it best; and this whether
it be a sting, or a spur, or horns, or tusks, or what it may of a like
kind.
Thus as males are stronger and more choleric than females, it is
in males that such parts as those just mentioned are found, either
exclusively, as in some species, or more fully developed, as in
others. For though females are of course provided with such parts as
are no less necessary to them than to males, the parts, for
instance, which subserve nutrition, they have even these in an
inferior degree, and the parts which answer no such necessary
purpose they do not possess at all
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