When I offered to speak on this subject I expected to review the literature, extract cases from my hospital's record system, and look for a few points of interest in a topic that had not come my way very often.

First, I found very little on the subject in the medical literature. An exception is a paper in 1972 by Nodar from Syracuse, New York, in which he studied a school population of about 2,000 over three years and found a 13 per cent incidence of tinnitus in normal children and a 59 per cent incidence in those who had failed audiometric screening tests.

There was also a paper by Glanville, Coles and Sullivan (1971) in which a family with objective tinnitus was described. One child of 2½ had narrow-band tones of 5 and 8 kHz. coming from the left and right ears respectively. Pure tone audiometry showed nearly normal hearing for low frequencies, but a notch in each ear at the frequency of the objective tinnitus. Curiously the child did not seem to hear the tinnitus himself.