AS TO SOUNDNESS. 49 



class about half-a-ton's weight. He would have one lot 

 brought out of the museum after another for eight or ten 

 successive lectures, and at the end hold up to the class 

 in triumph the every-day shoe. This shoe has been 

 slowly evolved, and answers every purpose as a shoe, 

 and has undergone little change for 300 years at least. 

 But these shoe inventors do not seek a shoe as such at 

 all; they rather seek for some iron, leather, or india- 

 rubber contortion which, being applied to one end of 

 the structure, will save the structure from all adverse 

 influences soever. But no doubt there will always be 

 an army of shoe-inventors in the profession, as there is 

 a restless army of pessary inventors in the medical 

 profession. In both cases each may be able to apply 

 his pet contortion to seeming advantage. These vagaries 

 have a short life in very limited areas, then they quietly 

 die, are museumed, and forgotten. The day will come, 

 but perhaps it will not be in our lifetime, when the 

 streets of our large towns will be paved rationally (with 

 wood pavement) ; and then — happy day ! — ^we shall have 

 horses wearing on their fore feet at once the most 

 scientific as it is the most common-sense shoe, the 

 Charlier. The stone pavior will cost the country many 

 millions of pounds in horse-flesh before this revolution 

 comes about, but no doubt it will one day be discovered 

 to be a State question. 



