in man, certain
diseases will cease to exist and parents nowadays bring their perfectly
sound children for tonsil removal in order to head off these affections.
Summing up the writer demonstrates that the functions of the tonsils
are, at present unknown and that until known nothing authoritative can
be said definitely on the subject, whether they be portals for the
entrance of disease or the exit for the very purpose of germs of
infection; common sense must decide;--whether they protect the organism
from danger or invite the presence of disease."

I, for my own part, am of Dr. Mackenzie's opinion: that there is an
endless flow of lymph from their interior to the free surface, which
unchecked, _prevents the entrance of germs from the surface and washes
out impurities from within_. That in any case, one of the functions
undoubtedly is the production of leucocytes or protective white blood
corpuscles and that the tonsil is not, as generally understood, a
lymphatic gland; that the general ignorance of this fact has led to the
useless sacrifice of thousands of tonsils, on the fallacious assumption
that their functional activities may be vicariously undertaken by other
lymphatic glands; and finally, that the physiologic integrity of the
tonsil is of the utmost importance in infant and child life.

The consensus of advanced scientific opinion is now to the effect that
the activity of the tonsils as possible accessories of disease has been
vastly exaggerated, that like the thousand and one successive
misleading theories which in turn, from time to time, have seized upon
the imagination and obsessed the minds of the medical fraternity for
brief and passing periods, this pernicious craze too, has about run its
course. The causes from which this peculiar lust for operation emanates
would be perhaps a difficult psychological puzzle to determine; the
malign impulse, as regards some special function, seems to spring, as it
were, by intuition, unbidden into being from the illusive depths of some
perverted intellect, to rage for a while through the medical world with
a death roll deadly as the plague and as suddenly to pass into desuetude
and disappear behind the impregnable ramparts of "prescriptive right"
and "privilege"--terms which in plain parlance mean to the masses in
cold actual fact, the absolute negation of all right--the domination of
arbitrary, irresponsible and State protected wrong.

Between facts and fables, the evide