Can you feel with your mouth? If you have the least little hole in one of your teeth, you know it as soon as you rub your tongue against it. How big it feels and how rough the edges seem! If you take a looking-glass, you find, if you can see the hole at all, that it is just a tiny, tiny hole.
Your tongue and lips, like the rest of your skin, are always touching and feeling things for you and sending messages to the brain. They say whether your milk is hot or cold, and whether the food you eat is soft enough and quite right in other ways. Your tongue is a very busy little “waiter”: he passes the food about in your mouth for the teeth to chew, and he rolls it about at a great rate. But he does more than this; he tells you something about how it tastes—not everything, as you may think, but only whether it is bitter, sweet, sour, or salty. Queer as it may seem, your nose tells you the other “tastes,” which are really smells. It is your nose that says whether you have a strawberry or a piece of onion in your mouth, whether it is coffee or cocoa that you are drinking.
Of what other use is your nose?—for only a little patch in the upper part is for smelling and tasting. The greater part of the nose is to breathe through. You see, your nose warms and moistens the outside air that you take in, so that, by the time it reaches your throat, it is as warm as your body and does not hurt your throat. Your nose also strains, or filters, out of the air the dust, lint, and germs that may be floating in it.
You should always keep your lips closed and breathe through your nose. Whenever you cannot breathe through your nose, there is something the matter. It may be that your nose is swollen shut with a “cold”; but that will last only a few days. If, however, your nose often feels “stuffed up,” there is probably something in it or behind it, that ought to be taken away. A throat doctor can easily cure you; and, when he has, you’ll be surprised how much better you feel and how much faster you grow.
A CLEAR PASSAGE TO THE LUNGS
(Follow the arrows.)
I once knew a little girl whose nose was always blocked up. She had headache and felt tired most of the time and was behind in her classes. The doctor told her what was the matter, but her father and mother were afraid that it might hurt her to have the doctor take out what was clogging her nose. Well, what did she do? Instead of crying and being afraid, one day she walked right into the doctor’s office and asked him to take out the adenoids, as we call these growths that block up the nose. And after the doctor had taken them out, she began to grow well and fat and strong so fast that she soon “caught up” in her classes.
A PASSAGE BLOCKED BY ADENOIDS