1907.] on Dexterity and the Bend Sinister. 625 



In perhaps the best known of Greek sculptures, the Discobolus 

 of Myron, from the Palazzo Lancelotti at Rome — an " instantaneous 

 photograph in marble " it has been called — representing^ a single 

 moment in the course of an action, we see the throwing of the 

 quoit from the right hand and the position the body was bound to 

 assume in gathering impetus for its discharge. That is a sculpture 

 of the best period of Greek art — the epoch of Phidias and 

 Praxiteles — and innumerable specimens of the same period and kind 

 exist, all showing right-handedness, not one, as far as I am aware^ 

 lef t-handedness. And surely the pronounced right-handedness of the 

 Greeks at that era did them no harm, for it may be questioned, as 

 Dr. Francis Galton has said, w^hether human nature has ever, physi- 

 cally or intellectually, reached a higher pitch of perfection than it 

 then did, or is, indeed, capable of doing so. But not merely at its 



Fig. 1. Bronze Foundry. (From a bronze in Berlin.) 



zenith, but in its formative stages, is right-handedness declared in 

 Greek art. Bronze-making was practised by the Greeks as earlv as 

 600 B.C., and here we have (Fig. 1), from a vase at Berlin, a representa- 

 tion of a bronze foundry, where we note the raking of the furnace with 

 the right hand foremost on the rake, just as a right-handed metal 

 worker holds it to-day, the use of the hammer and also of the spear 

 in the right hand. Of about the same date we have (Fig. 2) a 

 singularly uncouth and barbarous slab— Perseus slaying Medusa — 

 from one of the Doric temples at Silenus, in Sicily, leaving no doubt 

 as to the preferential use of the right hand ; and from the very 

 beginning of Greek art, at a period probably contemporaneous with 

 Troy, about 2000 B.C., we derive this ivory carving (Fig. 3) from 

 Enkomi in Cyprus, in which the bow is being handled fust as our 

 Vol. XYIII. (No. 101) 2 s 



