Scavengers in Your Lungs.

Opunake Times, Volume XXI, Issue 750, 23 June 1905, Page 4

Scavengers in Your Lungs.

One of the most wonderful pieces of mechanism in the body is the contrivance for clearing out dust and other injurious things from the lungs. Anatomists call it oiliated epithelium. • It is the skin which lines the tubes of the lungs, the lower part of the windpipe, the nose, and the little tube that connects the ear with the back of the mouth. This skin, instead of being made up of flat layers like the skin of the hands, face, etc., is composed of little shells shaped like carrots, and placed side by side, with their thick ends uppermost. Projecting from these thick ends are little hairs, or cilia, from twenty to thirty being attached to each cell. There are hundreds of millions of millions of them, and they are always in wave-like motion, just like corn moved by the wind. Although they are only l-30,000th of an inch long, and so fine that they can scarcely be seen by the most powerful microscope, they do an immense amount of work. About ten times per second they move swiftly forward, and then slowly back again. In this way they cause a constant flow of the fluids to take place in an outward direction, and with the fluid come the particles of smoke, dust and other things which we are always breathing in.