HEALTH TALKS TO CHILDREN.
By Dr. C. W. Lyman
THERE are ever so many creatures and things trying to get a living in this world. Some of them, like cows and horses, we have a great deal of use for. Others, like mosquitoes, bedbugs, weeds, poison ivy, and English sparrows, give us a good deal of trouble, without doing us the least good that we know of. So we try to keep them out, drive them away, or else kill them if they insist on coming in where we are trying to live ourselves. You know how weeds will keep vegetables from growing in the garden. You know how lice will stop hens from laying. We have to kill these weeds and lice, or else they will kill our plants and chickens. If they don't kill them, they certainly stop their growing, and make them feel wretchedly. Now there are things like weeds and lice so very small that it is impossible ever to see them with our eyes. They are a hundred times smaller than the separated grains of corn meal, smaller even than the particles that make white flour. Some of them are alive, like lice, and some are very little plants or weeds. Some live in water, some in the ground; some float around like dust, in the air; some grow on other things, just as lice grow under chickens' feathers, or as moss grows on rotten logs or the bark of trees. Most of these tiny plants and animals do no harm. They live, like skating bugs, on ponds, enjoying themselves in their own ways, and having little or nothing to do with us, good or bad. But there are some of them, especially those that cling to other things, that may do a great deal of harm, just as lice do chickens. Some live in our clothes, some in our hair, some on our feet, and some in our mouths. Wherever they find a layer of dirt, they grow faster, and get more dirty and bad-smelling themselves, and then our clothes and hair and bodies get dirty and bad-smelling too. What we have to do is to take water and soap and wash them off. In our mouths we use tooth-brushes and powder to brush them away from the teeth and tongue, where they grow in hundreds and thousands. It is like hoeing out the weeds from a garden. Some very bad-smelling little creatures live only on our feet. It's a nice thing, then, to wash them away from our feet and stockings almost every day. The ones that live in our hair we need to brush out and wash out. But the most important ones to get at are those inside our mouths. They have such a chance to go down inside our bodies and make still worse trouble even than where they lodge first. They make the breath smell, and the teeth decay, if we don't get rid of them. Now you can see one reason why it is better to breathe through the nose and not the mouth. The nose has a sort of sieve in it, and stops them from floating in with the air. The mouth hasn't any sieve, and lets them in, perhaps clear into our lungs.—The Voice.