These improvements will, it is needless to say, prove of immense importance to our home manufacture, and now that the true principles of tanning skins comes to be understood, many other improvements will gradually suggest themselves. The Rouel leather, which is the name given to it by the doctor, is certainly the best article ever produced in England (I speak now of calfskin), and works up as fine or even finer than the French, without its accompaniment of dubbing, or its impost of 30 per cent. In Queen Elizabeth’s time, parliament busied itself much in matters of “leather and prunella;” numerous enactments being made, especially in reference to the former. A letter to lord-treasurer Burleigh, by W. Fleetwood, recorder of London, explains the opposition of the tanners to some enactments against them: “the one for lymyng [an old grievance, after all, this lymyng], the other raisyng.” He says: “All the excellencie and conning of a tanner consisteth in skilfull making of his owes [lyes;] surelie they must be many and severall and one stronger than another. The time of changing of the lether from one owes must be timed at proscribed hours, or else the lether will be utterly spoiled. My Lo, there be an infinite number of rules to be observed in tanning, the few which tanners did ever conceive, much less the parliament, who conveyed their information of such whome nowe I do by experiens knowe not to be skilfull.” A conclusion which many of good Queen Victoria’s as well as Queen Bess’s subject have arrived at, after parliamentary evidence and enactment, in matters which history, experience, and philosophy, have long since taught us, flourish _best_ by being _let alone_. CHAPTER V. THE STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN FEET, ETC. “There is nothing more beautiful than the structure of the human foot,” says Sir Charles Bell; “nor perhaps any demonstration which would lead a well-educated person to desire to know more of anatomy than that of the foot. The foot has in its structure all the fine appliances you see in a building. In the first place, there is an arch, in whatever way you regard the foot; looking down upon it, we perceive several bones coming round the astralagos, and forming an entire circle of surfaces in the contact. If we look at the profile of the foot, an arch is still manifest, of which the posterior part is formed by the heel, and the anterior by the ball of the great toe; and in the front, we find in that direction a transverse arch: so that, instead of standing, as might be imagined, on a solid bone, we stand upon an arch composed of a series of bones, which are united by the most curious provision for the elasticity of the foot; hence, if we jump from height directly upon the heel, a severe shock is felt; not so, if we alight upon the ball of the great toe, for there an elasticity is formed in the whole foot, and the weight of the body is thrown upon this arch, and the shock avoided.”