Recent universal inspection of the throats of school children has revealed the fact that nearly all children at some time of life have more or less enlarged tonsils. And the reports maintain that this, for the most part, is harmless if not actually physiologic--natural--and that their removal in these cases is not only unnecessary but injurious to the proper development of the child. Nevertheless, the reports of the special hospitals for diseases of the nose and throat show to what an appalling extent this destructive operation is perpetrated throughout the land. "Much wild and incontinent talk," Dr. Mackenzie continues, "for which their teachers are sometimes largely to blame, has poisoned the minds of the younger generation of operators and thrown the public into hysteria. They are told that with the disappearance of the tonsils 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.