The Foot and its Covering is a vintage handbook on foot care, with a special focus on the importance of good-quality and well-fitted shoes. Essentially, it is a guidebook with hints for those who wear and those who make shoes and boots, with directions on picking and wearing shoes for health, performance, and function. It describes various causes of foot deformities and common ailments, providing advice on how these can be minimised or avoided. Highly recommended for those with an interest in historical shoe manufacturing. Contents include: “Introduction”, “The Foot”, “External Anatomy of the Foot”, “Physical Well-being of the Foot”, “Inquiry into the Nature of the Covering of the Foot, Etc.”, “Measurement—Stocking and Last”, “The Bones of the Foot”, “Upon Walking”, “Shoes and Boots”, “Of the Best Shape of a Shoe”, “Of the Inconveniences Occasioned by Ill-made Shoes, and their Remedies”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality addition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on the history of shoemaking.

Excerpt from The Foot and Its Covering: Comprising a Full Dr. Camper's Work on "the Best Form of Shoe" Having myself received much benefit from study ing the anatomical specimens in the Surgeons' Hall, it occurred to me that a visit of my men to that place would put things right. Accordingly, I procured tickets of admission for them, and the result was a complete revolution in the men's minds some who had hastily left my work regretting it afterwards. It was not the amount of information my men received by a single visit to the Surgeons' Hall that produced the favourable change in their minds, but the stimulus which that visit gave to the investiga tion of their own feet, and the nature of the covering the human foot required. Although they had been daily employed in making boots and shoes, their attention had never before been turned to the difier ence that existed between the lasts upon which boots and shoes were made, and the feet upon which they were to be worn. They were familiar with the former, went to the Surgeons' Hall to make them selves acquainted with the internal structure of the latter, and returned to their work with minds divested of former prejudices, and thus much the wiser to begin the world again. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reprint of the original. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

After the discovery of the anthropoid ape in Asia and in Africa, eighteenth-century Holland became the crossroads of Enlightenment debates about the human species. Material evidence about human diversity reached Petrus Camper, comparative anatomist in the Netherlands, who engaged, among many other interests, in menschkunde. Could only religious doctrine support the belief of human demarcation from animals? Camper resolved the challenges raised by overseas discoveries with his thesis of the facial angle, a theory which succeeding generations distorted and misused in order to justify slavery, racism, antisemitism, and genocide. Thanks to his abundant papers in Dutch archives, Camper's ideas are restored to their original state. Eighteenth-century issues differed from those of other centuries: Did orang-utans talk like humans, walk like humans; even rape humans? What was the skin pigmentation of Adam and Eve? Did the spectrum of human physiognomies around the globe reflect the Fall of Man, the Creator's bounty, or merely bizarre beauty practices? Why did the ideal beauty of the Greeks appear to be the reverse of the Hottentots? The book contains some 50 illustrations, including apes with hiking sticks or tea cups, metamorphoses of living forms, and Apollo or Venus icons which titillated the science of man.