No serious student of dermatology can have avoided noticing the enormous increase in the use of brown boots in the last quarter of a century. In 1879 a clubman would no more have thought of walking down Pall Mall in brown boots than of flying. But now even archdeacons frequent the Athenæum Club in that ubiquitous footwear. Necessity is probably the mother of invention, as Lord Avebury has pointedly remarked, and the introduction of the brown boot is due, according to a well-known Bond Street maker, to the exigencies of a retired General, who, finding it difficult to get his boots adequately blacked at his chambers, suggested, as a solution of his embarrassment, that it might be possible to devise a form of boot in which blacking could be entirely dispensed with. The example at once provoked imitation, and now it is estimated by Dr. Nicholson Roberts in the _Bootman_ that in London alone 1,250,000 pairs of tawny-coloured footgear are sold in the year. Boots, it may not be generally known, are made from the hides of various animals, terrestrial and marine. The skin is removed after the animal has been slaughtered, not before, and is then subjected to a variety of preliminary processes of a mollifying character, of which the most important is that of tanning. Tan, or tannin, as it is more correctly called, is a substance of a friable texture and a highly pronounced but hygienic odour. It is principally found in Indian tea, whence it is extracted by machinery especially designed for the purpose, and stored in tanyards. It is also occasionally used to deaden the sound of traffic and provide equestrians with a substratum calculated to minimize the wear and tear of their horses' hoofs. Dogs of certain breeds are also technically described as being "black and tan." The process of bootmaking, of which the headquarters is at Northampton, will be familiar to all who have attended the performances of Wagner's opera _Die Meistersinger_. It involves the use of powerful cutting instruments, cobbler's wax, needles, thread, and other implements, and the principal terms in its somewhat extensive terminology are vamp, welt, upper leathers, and nether sole. Bootmakers, like tailors, commonly sit cross-legged at their work, and hold pronounced political views; hence the term freebooter. But it has been noted that the makers of brown boots incline to Liberal Unionism. Their patron saint is Giordano Bruno, and in theology they affect latitudinarianism. The term "brown boots," it should also be noted, is a misnomer, as it includes shades of yellow, orange, and russet. Army men affect the latter, while stockbrokers and solicitors prefer the former.