can get a boot that shall ensure the free and full
and comfortable use of it; a boot in which a
long day's march over the autumn moors, or
through the shingle of the coast, maybe enjoyed
without more than a wholesome amount of weariness.

It is only within the last four years that we
may consider this matter of the right shape of
a boot to have been fairly and practically settled
for us by the anatomists. The doctors, centuries
upon centuries ago, concerned themselves with
the cure, not the prevention, of corns. Celsus
recommended scraping them and anointing them
with resin. Paulus Ægineta, who gave a whole
chapter to them, proposed rubbing them down
with pumice-stone, and then applying blister
fly, or a compound very much like our black
ink. Aëtius discussed the remedies known, but
did not include the prescription of Marcellus,
"Rub the corn with the ashes of an old shoe
mingled with oil." We heartily agree in the
advice to burn the shoe, but we are against
any further rubbing of the toe with it; there
having been more than rub enough.

Peter Camper, a famous physician and
naturalist of Leyden, in the last century, who studied
under Boerhaave, and whose works include a
treatise on the physiognomies of men of different
countries, and divers illustrations of his taste
for the fine arts, suggested, as good for corns,
an ointment of frogs and quadrupled mercury;
but a much better suggestion of Camper's was
his direct attack upon the causes of corns,
bunions, flat-foot, and other griefs of the kind,
in his essay, playful and philosophical, on the
Correct Form of Shoes. He apologises for his
subject by saying that he had told his pupils,
who declared all subjects to be exhausted, that
a man with full knowledge could find something
to say worth saying, upon any topic, even if it
were shoes. Dr. Camper, Professor of Medicine,
Surgery, and Anatomy, at Amsterdam and
Groningen, died seventy-two years ago; but in
his day, as now, the foot was distorted by the
shoemaker, and especially was treated then, as
now, as if it belonged to a goose, and had the
great toe in the middle of the foot. " It is
surprising," he says, " that while mankind in all
ages have bestowed the greatest attention upon
the feet of horses, mules, oxen, and other
animals of burden or draught, they have entirely
neglected those of their own species, abandoning
them to the ignorance of workmen, who, in
general, can only make a shoe upon routine
principles, and according to the absurdities of
fashion, or the depraved taste of the day. Thus
from our earliest infancy, shoes as at present
worn serve but to deform the toes and cover
the feet with corns, which not only render walking
painful, but, in some cases, absolutely
impossible. All this is caused by the ignorance
of our shoemakers." Marshal Saxe, who considered
the secret of war to consist in the power
of marching, recorded in his Memoirs a special
wish that soldiers " were to have shoes made of
thin leather, with low heels, which will fit
extremely well, and make them involuntarily
assume a good grace in marching." Sir Robert
Dick used to tell that when a Highland regiment
was at the battle of Maida, on being
ordered to charge, all the soldiers took off their
regulation boots and charged barefoot— but
then they were Highlanders. West India regiments
of men of colour commonly march out,
with their boots hanging from the muzzles of
their muskets. The English soldier is required
to case his foot in one of seven sizes of a
shoemaker's boot made upon the old pattern,
which entirely disregards the mechanism of
the foot and the natural movements for which
freedom should be given. The majority of adults,
having their feet gradually distorted by a long
course of moulding of the toes within the boot,
walk without pain in boots that ought to hurt
them. What is there, then, to complain of? In
the case of the soldier, much. Walking with
feet of which the great toes are displaced,
however painless, is not natural walking. A man's
full marching power can only be had out of a
pair of feet working as they were made to work.

Doctor Hermann Meyer, Professor of Anatomy
in the University of Zurich, is a man of mark,
well known to the medical profession out of his
own country, for a text-book of Physiological
Anatomy, in which he has incorporated
investigations (for which he is especially distinguished)
on the mechanics of the skeleton, and chiefly
on the mechanism of the foot and knee. In
the spring of the year 'fifty-seven, it occurred
to Professor Meyer to apply his special
knowledge to the writing of a treatise more practical
than Camper's, On the Correct Form of Shoe,
which accordingly appeared, with a sharp
exposition of the hurts we suffer from shoemakers,
as A Picture of Contemporary Civilisation, called
after that attic thief Procrustes, who had a bed
to the size of which he stretched or trimmed all
travellers whom he caught. Procrustes ante
portas (Procrustes at our doors). For in the line
of boots at the doors of an inn-gallery the doctor
would see many a bed of Procrustes for toes.
Professor Meyer's scientific paper was so
simple and clear, that the recasting of it into
the form of a scientific tract for public use, was
urged by medical men in many countries. It
was published, therefore, at Zurich as a little
independent treatise at the end of the year 'fifty-
seven, and already in England it has found a
sensible physician, Dr. John Stirling Craig, of
Stratford-upon-Avon, who has thought it worth
translating, under the title of Why the Shoe
Pinches; a Contribution to Applied Anatomy;
and has so issued it as a sixpenny tract for the
good of his countrymen.

But we have not only the Zurich professor
for our counsellor. The other day, Dr. Humphry,
Lecturer on Anatomy and Physiology in the
University of Cambridge, published a little book
containing the enlarged substance of two
lectures on the Foot and Hand; and, in his lecture
on the foot, appended to a clear account of its
anatomy, are practical comments on the right
form of shoe. This teacher not only assents
heartily to Professor Meyer's doctrine, but