Earache is simply the pain due to acute inflammation in the small drum-cavity of the ear. This in the large majority of cases will subside and drain back again into the throat through the Eustachian tube. In a fair percentage of instances, however, it will break in the opposite direction, and we have the familiar ruptured drum and discharge from the ear. In either case the drum becomes thickened, so that it can no longer vibrate properly; the delicate little chain of bones behind it, like the levers of a piano, becomes clogged, and the child becomes deaf, whether a chronic discharge be present or not. This is the secret of his "inattention," his "indifference,"--even of his apparent disobedience and rebelliousness. What other children hear without an effort he has to strain every nerve to catch. He misunderstands the question that is asked of him, makes an absurd answer, and is either scolded or laughed at. It isn't long before he falls into the attitude: "Well, I can't get it right, anyhow, no matter how I try, so I don't care." Up to five or ten years ago the puzzled and distracted teacher would simply report the child for stupidity, indifference, and even insubordination. In nine cases out of ten, when children are naughty or stupid, they are really sick. Not content with dulling one of the child's senses, these thugs of the body-politic proceed to throttle two others--smell and taste. Obviously the only way of smelling anything is to sniff its odor into your nose. And if this be more or less, or completely, blocked up, and its delicate mucous membranes coated with a thick, ropy discharge, you will not be able to distinguish anything but the crudest and rankest of odors. But what has this to do with taste? Merely that two-thirds of what we term "taste" is really smell. Seal the nostrils and you can't "tell chalk from cheese," not even a cube of apple from a cube of onion, as scores of experiments have shown. We all know how flat tea, coffee, and even our own favorite dishes taste when we have a bad cold, and this, remember, is the permanent condition of the palate of the poor little mouth-breather. No wonder his appetite is apt to be poor, and that even what food he eats will not produce a flow of "appetite juice" in the stomach, which Pavloff has shown to be so necessary to digestion. No wonder his digestion is apt to go wrong, ably assisted by the continual drip of the chronic discharge down the back of his throat; his bowels to become clogged and his abdomen distended.