The dull, dead tone of the voice in these children is, of course, an obvious effect of the blocked nostrils. Similarly, the broken sleep, with dreams of suffocation and of "Things Sitting on the Chest," are readily explained by the desperate efforts that the little one makes to breathe through clogging nostrils, in which the discharges, blown and sneezed out in the daytime, dry and accumulate during sleep, until, half-suffocated, it "lets go" and draws in huge gulps of air through the open mouth. No child ever became a mouth-breather from choice, or until after a prolonged struggle to continue breathing through its nose. This brings us to the question, What are these adenoids, and how do they come to produce such serious disturbances? This can be partially answered by saying that they are tonsils and with all a tonsil's susceptibility to irritation and inflammation. But that only raises the further question, What is a tonsil? And to that no answer can be given but Echo's. They are one of the conundrums of physiology. All we know of them is that they are not true _glands_, as they have neither duct nor secretion, but masses of simple embryonic tissue called _lymphoid_, which has a habit of grouping itself about the openings of disused canals. This is what accounts for their position in the throat, as they have no known useful function. The two largest, or throat-tonsils, surround the inner openings of the second gill-slits of the embryo; the lingual tonsil, at the base of the tongue below, encircles the mouth of the duct of the thyroid gland (the _goitre_ gland); and our own particular Pandora's Box above, in the roof of the pharynx, is grouped about the opening of another disused canal, which performs the singular and apparently most uncalled-for office of connecting the cavity of the brain with the throat. They can all of them be removed completely without any injury to the general health, and they all tend to shrink and become smaller--in the case of the topmost, or pharyngeal, almost disappear--after the twelfth or fourteenth year. Not only have they an abundant crop of troubles of their own, as most of us can testify from painful experience, but they serve as a port of entry for the germs of many serious diseases, such as tuberculosis, rheumatism, diphtheria, and possibly scarlet fever. They appear to be a strange sort of survival or remnant,--not even suitable for the bargain-counter,--a hereditary leisure class in the modern democracy of the body, a fertile soil for all sorts of trouble.