CHAPTER XIII 

 THE HUMAN FOOT 



THE human hand, a strangely, almost shockingly, primi- 

 tive survival, has received enormous praise mistakenly 

 lavished by the philosopher and the anatomist; but the 

 human foot, a wonderfully modified and distinctly human 

 member, has had but scant appreciation. This assertion 

 is made in the face of the fact that the human foot has 

 provided the subject-matter for monographs in several 

 languages. 



The foot is apt to be regarded as a poor relation of the 

 hand, as a thing which, once being far more useful, has 

 degenerated, within the narrow confines of a boot, into a 

 rather distorted and somewhat useless member. Al- 

 though in modern Man the boot has had its definite in- 

 fluence (as in limiting the possibilities of the power of 

 grasp), such generalizations concerning the human foot 

 are very far from true. If Man should wish to point 

 with pride to any organ the structure of which definitely 

 severs him from all other existing Primates, it is to the 

 foot that he should point. If " missing links " are to 

 be tracked with complete success, the foot, far more than 

 the skull, or the teeth, or the shins, will mark them as 

 Monkey or as Man. The weakness of Achilles lay in his 

 heel; the weakness of the arboreal Primate masquerading 

 as Man lies in the structure of its foot. 



It is in the grades of evolution of the foot that the 

 stages of the missing link will be most plainly presented 

 to the future paleontologist, when time and chance shall 

 -have discovered the feet of such forms as Pithecanthropus 

 and Eoanthropus. 



73 



