Again, I may mention that one day last term [155], having to address a meeting of Welsh undergraduates on folklore, I ventured to introduce this question. They agreed with me that English shoes did not, as a rule, fit Welsh feet, and this because they are made too low in the instep: I ought to have said that they all agreed except one undergraduate, who held his peace. He is a tall man, powerful in the football field, but of no dark complexion, and I have never dared to look in the direction of his feet since, lest he should catch me carrying my comparisons to cruel extremes. Perhaps the flatness of the feet of the one race is not emphasized so much as the height of the instep in those of the other. At any rate I find this way of looking at the question somewhat countenanced by a journalist who refers his readers to Wm. Henderson's notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties, p. 74. The passage relates more particularly to Northumberland, and runs as follows:--'In some districts, however, special weight is attached to the "first-foot" being that of a person with a high-arched instep, a foot that "water runs under." A flat-footed person would bring great ill-luck for the coming year.'
These instances do not warrant the induction that Celts are higher in the instep than Teutons, and that they have inherited that characteristic from the non-Aryan element in their ancestry. Perhaps the explanation is, at least in part, that the dwellers in hilly regions tend to be more springy and to have higher insteps than the inhabitants of flatter lands. The statement of Dr. Karl Blind on this point does not help one to a decision when he speaks as follows in Folk-Lore for 1892, p. 89:--'As to the instep, I can speak from personal experience. Almost every German finds that an English shoemaker makes his boots not high enough in the instep. The northern Germans (I am from the south) have perhaps slightly flatter feet than the southern Germans.' The first part of the comparison is somewhat of a surprise to me, but not so the other part, that the southern Germans inhabiting a hillier country, and belonging to a different race, may well be higher in the instep than the more northern speakers of the German language. But on the whole the more one examines the qualtagh, the less clearly one sees how he can be the representative of a particular race. More data possibly would enable one to arrive at greater probability.