When, at home, you give the baby a ball or a key or a watch to play
with, what does he do with it the very first thing? He is never quite
happy, is he, until he has put it into his mouth? Does he want to eat
it? No, he wants to feel it; and he has not yet learned to feel very
carefully with his hands, as you do.
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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: A PASSAGE BLOCKED BY ADENOIDS]
When you breathe well through your nose, you can smell and taste
better, too. In fact, when your nose is clogged, you cannot smell at
all.
How does this sense of smell help us? You say we can smell the flowers
and the fresh air after the rain, and cookies baking, and all the
things that we like so well. Yes, and these give us pleasure; but how
about the bad smells? The bad smells are warnings. If there is a dead
mouse or rat about, we smell it; and that leads us to look for it and
take it away. We smell the dirt and get rid of it, and thus keep away
sickness. When we walk into a room, if the air is bad we smell it at
once and open a window or a door, and so save ourselves from being
poisoned.
Some people hurt their noses by smoking tobacco. The inside skin of
the nose is very delicate, and the smoke going back and forth through
the nose and the throat keeps them from doing their work properly. It
is very bad for little children even to smell tobacco smoke. It seems
in some way to keep them from growing as they would in clear fresh
air. What a silly habit smoking is! It does no one any good. It hurts
not only the people who make the smoke, but the people who have to
smell it. Most of the people who smoke tobacco have to learn to like
it. It almost always makes them very sick when they first begin.
Sir Walter Raleigh, or the men he sent to America, first taught our
great-great-great-grandfathers to smoke. His men bought tobacco of the
Indians here and took it back to England; and Sir Walter himself
learned to smoke and made smoking fashionable. The first time that Sir
Walter's servant saw him smoking, he thought his master was on fire;
so what did he do but bring a big bucket of water and throw it all
over him! I wish that that bucket of water had settled the matter, so
that Sir Walter had stopped smoking and had never taught anyone else
to smoke. If it had, think how much money might have been put to
better use, for smoking is a very costly habit. And it is not only
wasteful of money, but, worse still, of health; for it is the cause of
a great deal of poor health and disease.
Remember that you want the air you breathe perfectly fresh and clean
and not spoiled and poisoned by tobacco smoke.