Already the angle of the foot with the leg is less acute and more adapted for the erect posture. The child is wrapped up by a nurse in a black velvet covering.
At Zermatt, on a sunny afternoon, Alois Kalbermatten and Peter Perren were good enough to allow me to pose them with their bare feet on a well-known rock, appropriately named the Shoehorn, while Captain Abney made admirable photographs, from which the reproductions accompanying this chapter were selected.
The guides laughed like schoolboys over the business, or over my solemnity at a scientific experiment. The photographs show very well the climbing position of the foot, and, if a comparison be made of an amateur’s foot, it does not appear that the angle made by the foot with the leg is more acute in the case of the guide. Even with Röntgen’s rays I do not think that any structural difference in the bones of the foot would be discovered.
In the case of the infant, so much of the bones of the foot is in the cartilaginous stage that nothing of the configuration could be studied with these searching rays, because cartilage shows so little shadow.
The foot then of the infant can be flexed until it is almost parallel with the leg; during growth it loses flexibility as it gains in strength and becomes adapted for the erect position and for walking, which is the natural gait of man. The angle made by the foot with the leg in adults is fairly fixed, and a difference between guides and amateurs in this respect is not easy to discover.
Nevertheless, there may be more power on the part of the experienced to keep a straight knee under the conditions of a flexed foot, and as the straight position is the strong position of the knee, the guides may well have an advantage there.
Mr. Clinton Dent has so ably described the mechanism of the uphill walk in the Badminton book on mountaineering, that it is only necessary to remind sportsmen of the figure therein of “ein junger,” page 92, going on his toes, using so much his calf muscles, and so little his greater powers above.
GUIDE’S FOOT IN CLIMBING POSITION AGAINST THE SHOEHORN ROCK AT ZERMATT.