134 GOOD HEALTH 



one day. If you have no cold in your head, yet can- 

 not breathe when your mouth is shut, something is 

 the matter, and your father should take you to see 

 the doctor. 



There are three reasons why we should breathe through 

 the nose and not through the mouth. 



1. The nose warms the air for the lungs. 



2. The nose helps the air to be damp before 

 it gets to the lungs. 



3. The nose cleans the air for the lungs. 



It is easy to see that a bad cold in the head stops all 

 the work of the nose. When the air comes through the 

 mouth to the lungs it is not so clean from dust and 

 microbes as it ought to be, it is not damp enough, and 

 it is not so warm as when it goes through the nose. 

 The sensible thing, then, for any person to do is to keep 

 from catching cold, to shut his mouth, and to breathe 

 through his nose. 



Still there is another extreme: when we try not to 

 catch cold we may actually get the nose too dry. That 

 is apt to happen in winter when people live in houses 

 that are heated by stoves, furnaces, or steam pipes. Often 

 in such places the air is so dry that the nose cannot help 

 getting dry too. You know how it is with wet towels 

 over a register or near a radiator: the hot air takes all 

 the water out of them, and they are dry in no time. 

 Hot air does the same thing to any damp nose that 



