Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/410

398 footed animals, manus and pes) are arranged on a uniform plan: to each five digits, the first having two phalanges and the others three. The first digit is generally attenuated, often suppressed, but whenever it exists it has two phalanges only.

This curious difference is nowhere, so far as I know, explained. I can not discover that any animal (below man), recent or fossil, exists or has existed from the times of the Trias formations till now in which this arrangement has appeared to be essential. It may be of some advantage in the quadrumana, and doubtless the human hand is thus better fitted for its functions, but it seems to me to be much more difficult to imagine it possible for any other arrangement to exist in the foot unless the whole scheme of it, so to speak, were changed. It is essential that the only joint in the great-toe should be drawn to the ground by the strong flexor tendon attached to the final phalanx close to it; if another joint existed it must rise up, as occurs in the other toes, and the solid bearing would be lost. Apart from this, it must be admitted that it is mainly due to the special development of the great-toe in a line with the long axis of the foot that man is enabled to exercise the attribute, in all ages regarded as a noble one, of standing erect. Yet this special feature is the one which the conventional boot does most to conceal, and in direct proportion as it is successfully concealed the wearer is supposed to be dressed in good taste. It would seem to be regarded as necessary to reduce the foot to even-sided symmetry; but there is no law of beauty which requires this. Mr. Ruskin assuredly would not say that it is in any of "the eternal canons of loveliness" decreed that an object to be beautiful must be symmetrical. An architect required to provide more space on one than on the other side of a building would not seek to conceal or even to minimize the difference; he would seek rather to accentuate it, and give the two sides of the structure distinctive features. To me it appears that it is on this principle only that a boot, to be at once useful, graceful, and appropriate, can be designed.

Moreover, the sense of symmetry, natural and reasonable where the same function has to be performed, is, or ought to be, satisfied by the exact correspondence of the two feet, which, taken jointly, may be described as the two halves of an unequally expanded dome, irregularly extended at the base, the greatest extension being in the line of the greatest expansion of the dome, through which line the division runs. The dividing-line thus makes the margin of the two feet parallel to each other. It may be that the inner margin of the great-toe, if produced backward, would fall a little distance from the inner side of the heel. A perfect adult foot, in which the great-toe is not and never has been diverted outward, and in which there has been no consequent thickening of the large joint, is not easy to find. In children the inner line is often visibly concave. It may be remarked that in rest the great-toe is everted as well as drawn upward, in which posi-