NATIONAL DIFFERENCES
The statement made above regarding the prevalence among Italians of a longer second toe enables us also to qualify the remark made in the Westminster Review (1884), that “Even at the present day it is a fact well known to all sculptors that Italy possesses the finest models as regards the female hands and feet in any part of Europe; and that to the eye of an Italian the wrists and ankles of most English women would not serve as a study even for those revivalisms of the antique which are to be purchased in our streets for a few shillings.” Whatever may be true of wrists and ankles, the toes must be excepted, at least if a larger percentage of Italian than of English women have the second toe longer.
Although in matters where so many individual differences exist it is hazardous to generalise, the following remarks on national peculiarities in feet, made by a reviewer of Zachariae’s Diseases of the Human Foot, may be cited for what they are worth: “The French foot is meagre, narrow, and bony; the Spanish foot is small and elegantly curved, thanks to its Moorish blood.... The Arab foot is proverbial for its high arch; ‘a stream can run under his foot,’ is a description of its form. The foot of the Scotch is large and thick—that of the Irish flat and square—the English short and fleshy. The American foot is apt to be disproportionately small.”