over—feet with weak ankles that have lost their uprightness—sweaty feet—sensitive feet that take cold by wetting, and give their owner a consumption—and dirty feet that deserve to be diseased if they are not. The causes of these depravities, diseases, and deformities are many and various. Thick and stiff leather coverings have had much to do with corns and callosities. False taste and fashions, bad habits of changing shoes, unnatural-shaped lasts, awkwardness in gait and movement, muscular weakness, and perhaps other causes that we do not yet know, have combined to produce flat insteps, crooked toes, large joints, weak ankles, and all the rest. The subject is one in which all who have not lost their feet are more or less interested. To those who have children it is more especially important. While much may be done to reform the feet of adult persons, and it is intended to hold out all possible encouragement to them to attempt it, still it is with the children that the main work of correcting, improving, and educating must be effected. If a child’s feet are trained up in the way they should _go_, they will not be likely, when they are older, to depart from it, and incur those penalties appropriately attached to an abuse of the foot’s nature. The particular causes of the more important of these troubles will be shown in the succeeding chapters, and suggestions for their remedy or prevention given. CHAPTER II. Natural Position of the Toes—Anatomical Argument—correspondence of Foot and Hand—Necessity of Freedom for the Toes—Criticism on Forms of Sole. One of the worst of the distortions of the feet is the obliquity or bending of the great toe toward the outside, a fault with which several troublesome affections are often connected, besides the more prominent one, the enlargement of the joints. To be convinced that this is a deformity, and of the _extent_ to which it is so, let any one notice the shape and natural position of a child’s foot, before it has been altered by forcing into a falsely-shaped shoe. _The toes will be found lying straight forward in the line of the foot’s length_, with plenty of room for them to touch the ground without pressing against each other. This is plainly the case with every barefoot boy who is running about the streets or over the farm. There are no cramped toes; on the contrary, they sometimes appear to be separated more than necessary, and the great toe, instead of inclining toward the outside of the foot, seems to be almost turning to the opposite direction.