During the past year, I have been engaged in a study of the development of the feet of fifty children between the ages of 18 months and 4 years at the Institute of Child Welfare of the University of California. Although the research is still in progress and the number of cases thus far studied is small, a preliminary report of the work seems appropriate at this time, first, because a careful review of the existing literature indicates that attention should be called to the gaps in the knowledge of the functional development of the foot as an organ of locomotion, and second, because in the course of the investigation it was necessary to devise a new method. the description of which may be useful to ethers who are confronted with the problem of the accurate evaluation of foot function in children or adults.
Despite the increasing substitution of other