health needs of small towns and rural districts.
Fortunately the more important signs can be easily read by the average
parent or teacher. Fortunately, too, it is easy to persuade mothers and
teachers that they can lighten their own labors, add to their
efficiency, and help their children by being on the watch for mouth
breathing, for strained, crossed, or inflamed eyes, for decaying teeth,
for nervousness and sluggishness. Years ago, when I taught school in a
Minnesota village, I had never heard of adenoids, hypertrophied
tonsils, myopia, hypermetropia, or the relation of these defects and of
neglected teeth to malnutrition, truancy, sickness, and dullness. I now
see how I could have saved myself several failures, the taxpayers a
great deal of money, the parents a great deal of disappointment, and
many children a life of inefficiency, had I known what it is easy for
all teachers and parents to learn to-day.

[Illustration: MOUTH BREATHERS BEFORE "ADENOID PARTY"]

The features in the following cut are familiar to teachers the world
over. Parents may reconcile themselves to such lips, eyes, and mouths,
but seldom do even neglectful parents fail to notice "mouth breathing."
Children afflicted by such features suffer torment from playfellows
whose scornful epithets are echoed by the looking-glass. No fashion
plate ever portrays such faces. No athlete, thinker, or hero looks out
from printed page with such clouded, listless eyes. The more wonder,
therefore, that the meaning of these outward signs has not been
appreciated and their causes removed; conclusive reason, also, for not
being misled by recent talk of mouth breathing, adenoids, and enlarged
tonsils, into the belief that the race is physically deteriorating.
Three generations ago Charles Dickens in his _Uncommercial Traveller_
pointed out a relation between open mouths and backwardness and
delinquency that would have saved millions of dollars and millions of
life failures had the civilized world listened. He was speaking of
delinquent girls from seventeen to twenty years old in Wapping
Workhouse: "I have never yet ascertained why a refractory habit should
affect the tonsils and the uvula; but I have always observed that
refractories of both sexes and every grade, between a Ragged School and
the Old Bailey, have one voice, in which the tonsils and uvula gain a
diseased ascendency."

To-day we are just beginning to see over again the connection between
inabilit