Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/106

 *ing. They should be removed in the mode to be described in the chapter on hair. By this means they are eradicated and without pain.

When, as occasionally happens, a spider or other insect enters the ear, there is no occasion for alarm, and no efforts whatever should be made to extract it. The treatment is to fill the ear at once with sweet oil, which is at hand in every house. This destroys the intruder, and the extraction must be left to the physician, as there is great danger to the delicate internal organs of hearing from rough handling.

Some persons have a habit of wearing cotton in their ears to protect them against earache. This is objectionable for many reasons. It dulls the hearing, alters the secretion of wax, changes the expression of the organ, and gives a sickly look.

When the ear obstinately insists on standing out from the head in grown persons, it is next to impossible to prevent it. In children, it is much easier, and therefore every mother should see to it that the children's caps, their bonnet strings, and the folds of the hair, do not impress this unsightly direction on the cartilage. Moreover, it becomes in this respect the duty of parents to forbid school teachers from pulling, boxing, or twisting the ears of their scholars, as is a custom in many schools. Such violence often imprints a permanent unseemly shape, which is the source of much secret mental pain in after years.