NARROW JAWS AND SMALL FEET . 139 



be broken and look stubby, like a laboring man's he has small cases 

 made, I believe, of ivory or some fancy wood, to draw on over those 

 prolonged nails and preserve them intact. 



Americans do not seem to be quite so anxious to prove to the out- 

 side world that they are incapable of walking, or of manual labor, as the 

 Chinese, but they are extremely desirous of looking chic, smart and up- 

 to-date, and we have seemingly as great a horror of feet which have 

 grown to their natural size, as the celestials. We uniformly buy our 

 shoes from a size to a size and a half too small for us. We do not real- 

 ize that our feet should spread, not the toes alone, but the whole foot, 

 like an animal's paw, with every step we take. Why we have the insane 

 delusion that our feet should be small, out of all proportion to our bod- 

 ies, no one so far as I know can explain. Orators have praised small 

 feet, and poets have sung to them. Fashion plates have depicted them 

 and lovers have sighed for them, and really from want of proper use, 

 from compression and from the consequent arrested development be- 

 cause of their being encased in unyielding leather boxes from early 

 childhood, our feet are much smaller in proportion to our size and 

 weight than they should be. But this is not all. By reason of the ab- 

 surd pointed-toe shoes, which men and women both wear, man is be- 

 coming practically a unidactylous animal. That means that we culti- 

 vate our great toes and let all the others atrophy for want of use, when 

 they are not doubled up or twisted over each other so that standing on 

 the feet for any length of time, not to mention walking, is exceedingly 

 painful and sometimes impossible. In these cases the pointed shoes 

 have been adopted after the smaller toes have grown somewhat, and 

 like those of the unfortunate Chinese girls, they must be crowded out 

 of the way, for no genteel person in either China or America can afford 

 to have the toes spread out as nature intended them to be. Often, how- 

 ever, the pointed shoes have been worn in early childhood and the poor 

 little toes, in consequence, have never developed, and are only rudiments 

 of what they should be. In the classical foot the second toe is longer 

 than the first, the third toe is the same length as the first and the fourth 

 and fifth toes are well shaped and free from corns and spread out and 

 take good hold of the ground when the person to whom they belong is 

 walking. This is an exceedingly important point. Our toes should 

 spread apart, as said before, like an animal's paws when we put our 

 weight on the forward part of the foot in stepping out with the other 

 foot. 



There should be plenty of room in the shoe for the toes to do this, 

 and it is largely because the toes are so tightly confined in pointed 

 shoes and can not spread out that Americans are such poor walkers. 

 The ridiculous high heels are unsightly and injurious and make walk- 

 ing difficult, yet they do not deform the foot, the most beautiful and 



