Man alone possesses this mark of a high lineage, and it adds point to Shakespeare’s description of man as “paragon of animals,” and Huxley’s “a superb animal, head of the sentient world.” For winning this integral part of a perfect walking-foot man must stoop to conquer; he must descend from the trees in order that he may have life and liberty; whether he bears the ancient surname of Tarsius or the more honoured one of Pithecus matters not. Names had not in those early times usurped that tyranny over man’s mind which they have done among his modern descendants. He came into that terrestrial kingdom which was to be his own with many a limitation, but with the promise and potency of an unexampled evolution, when he assumed more fully the erect posture and saw that his inheritance was very good. Neither then nor since has he ever reached the fleetness of foot of the Thibetan wild ass, the astonishing sense of smell of the dog or horse, the keen sight of the hawk, or the climbing power of that simian family upon whom he turned his back as on a poor relation. He became _par excellence_ the walking biped of earth, as, even with greater value to his mastery of the world he learned to talk in articulate language. A walking animal and a talking animal, with vast stretches of time for training these new powers of his, he became modified into the variegated human stocks, black, yellow and white, that now inhabit the earth. A Crumbling Arch. A digression, I hope, will be pardoned here before the value and beauty of the plantar arch and its mode of forging are described, and it is possible the latter may add some force to the former. Scientific (or, must I say?) semi-scientific writings are not concerned with the snobbishness of much of the pride of birth which still survives among us. But I would indeed think myself to be doing “my bit” if I could induce the present generation of young women and men to think highly of their plantar arches, nobler evidence of a “good” family than soft fair skin, taper fingers, Grecian nose, slender waist or that hair of which the decaying line of the long-haired kings of old France were too proud. For one reason or another, probably analogous to those for which he has lost so much the vigour of his hair of the scalp, or his dwindling wisdom-teeth and shrinking little toes, in other words, racial degeneration, modern man seems to be losing his plantar arch. For about three years I have made careful but saddening study of the ankles and feet of young women, and have embodied it in a variety of journals. This study has included about two thousand examples in young women of incipient or advanced flat-footedness as revealed, nay, flaunted before us in our towns and villages. This revelation has been offered by women’s shortened skirt, so that one can now note for oneself the ugly and disabling ankles and feet in the streets of any town, without the complicated business of a surgical examination.