74 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ness. The laboring-men of this country, who from their childhood 

 wear heavy, stiff, and badly shaped boots, and in whom, consequently, 

 the play of the ankle, feet, and toes is lost, have generally small and 

 shapeless legs and wasted calves, and walk as if on stilts, with a swing- 

 ing motion from the hips. Our infantry soldiers also suffer much in 

 the same manner, the regulation boots in use in the service being ex- 

 ceedingly ill adapted for the development of the feet. Much injury 

 to the general health the necessary consequence of any impediment 

 to freedom of bodily exercise must also be attributed to this cause. 

 Since some of the leading shoemakers have ventured to deviate a little 

 from the conventional shape, those persons who can afford to be spe- 

 cially fitted are better off as a rule than the majority of poorer people, 

 who, although caring less for appearance, and being more dependent 

 for their livelihood upon the physical welfare of their bodies, are 

 obliged to wear ready-made shoes of the form that an inexorable cus- 

 tom has prescribed. 



No sensible person can really suppose that there is anything in 

 itself ugly, or even unsightly, in the form of a perfect human foot ; 

 and yet all attempts to construct shoes upon its model are constantly 

 met with the objection that something extremely inelegant must be the 

 result. It will, perhaps, be a form to which the eye is not quite ac- 

 customed ; but we all know how extremely arbitrary is Fashion in her 

 dealings with our outward appearance, and how anything which has 

 received her sanction is for the time considered elegant and tasteful, 

 while a few years later it may come to be looked upon as positively 

 ridiculous. That our eye would soon get used to admire a different 

 shape may be easily proved by any one who will for a short time wear 

 shoes constructed upon a more correct principle, when the prevailing 

 pointed shoes, suggestive of cramped and atrophied toes, become posi- 

 tively painful to look upon. 



Only one thing is needed to aggravate the evil effect of a pointed 

 toe, and that is the absurdly high and narrow heel so often seen now 

 on ladies' boots, which throws the whole foot into an unnatural position 

 in walking, produces diseases well known to all surgeons in large prac- 

 tice, and makes the nearest approach yet effected by any European 

 nation to the Chinese custom which we generally speak of with sur- 

 prise and reprobation. And yet this fashion appears just now on the 

 increase among people who boast of the highest civilization to which 

 the world has yet attained. 



But when, in spite of all the warnings of common sense and expe- 

 rience,* we continue to torture and deform our horses' mouths and 

 necks with tight bearing-reins, as injurious, as useless, and as ugly 

 as any of these customs we practice on ourselves, and all for no better 

 reason, we may well say with Dr. Johnson, " Few enterprises are so 

 hopeless as a contest with fashion." 



* See "Bits and Bearing-Reins," by Edward Fordham Flower. Cassell & Co., 1879. 



