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 shce 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. 
