Many persons probably know not that _wooden shoes_ date from a very remote period; for the Jews wore them long before the age of Augustus. Perhaps they were not made exactly like the wooden shoes so common among the poorer classes in France; but it is not less true that this kind of covering for the feet was generally adopted among nearly all the people of Judæa: sometimes, however, we observe leather shoes among them; and the Jewish soldiers covered their feet with copper, or with iron. The shoes of the Egyptians were of _papyrus_; the Chinese and the Indians manufactured theirs of silk, of rushes, of the bark of trees, of iron, of brass, of gold or of silver, according as their fortune permitted, or their fancy dictated. At Rome, as in Greece, leather was the material which covered the feet of every one. The Roman women wore _white_ shoes: the common people wore _black_: and the magistrates set off their feet with _red_ shoes on solemn occasions. A thousand years ago the most powerful sovereigns of Europe had wooden soles to their shoes. Under William Rufus, son of the great Duke of Normandy, who conquered at Hastings, in 1066, a fashion was introduced into England of giving to the shoes an excessive length; the point which terminated them was stuffed with tow, and curved up on high like a ram’s horn. In the fourteenth century they thought of connecting these points with the knee, by means of a gold chain. Great must have been the surprise of the worthy Anglo-Saxons, on beholding this strange species of vegetation sprouting up suddenly amongst them! Some called to remembrance the history of the serpent’s teeth, which Cadmus sowed, whence a swarm of soldiers issued; others conceived that it was the costume of magicians; and little children sometimes, when going to bed, asked their mothers if there was no danger that their heads might be metamorphosed in the night into those of a horrible deer? Before leaving this paragraph upon shoes, we would call to recollection the antiquity of the art of the leather-dresser: open for that purpose the Iliad, and you will find in the Seventeenth Book, tanners preparing skins to make leather of them. This class of manufacturers composed, three hundred years ago, a very important body, since we possess the account of a furious quarrel which broke out, under Queen Elizabeth, between them and the shoe-makers. We are pleased to record here the perfection with which they manufacture leather at this date in the New World. In South Carolina, as well as in the state of Virginia, the Indian women are so skilful in this branch of industry that a single person can dress as many as ten deer-skins a day.[4] Of all the transformations which are wrought in the arts, that of the animal substance into leather is, without doubt, one of the most curious. The process, by means of which they set about accomplishing it in old times, was the result of a calculation still more ingenious than