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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 means of locomotion for walking, the importance of the human foot as an organ of support and propulsion is still sufficient to inspire a considerable literature. Thus, in a monograph on flatfoot, which appeared in 1925, Cramer 1 gathered together more than 1,000 references, and it is safe to suppose that several hundred have been added since that date.It is perhaps not surprising that in this literature the diagnosis and treatment of structural and functional conditions in adults receive the greatest attention. Several studies of conditions of the feet among school children are reported, but there is little on the conditions of the feet of children of preschool age; and there are practically no data concerning the normal functional development of the foot during the first decade of life.It is evident also that attention has been focused mainly on the weight-bearing function of the foot and that little has been reported con¬ cerning the development of the equally important propulsive function.Furthermore, even in this limited field of observation and measurement, there is a striking variation of definition and a correspond¬ ingly great discrepancy among the observations of the several investi¬ gators. Thus, Roberts 2 examined 10,000 school children between the

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