SECTION Il, 1886. EAN] Trans. Roy. Soc. CANADA. 
I.—The Right Hand and Left-handedness. 
By Dante WirsON, LL.D., F.R.S.E., President of University College, Toronto. 
(Read May 25, 1886.) 
The hand of man is one of his most distinctive characteristics. Without it he would 
be, for all practical purposes, inferior to many other animals. It is the executive portion 
of the upper limb whereby the limits of his capacity as “the tool-user” are determined. 
As such, it is the essential seat of the primary sense of touch, the organ of the will, the 
instrument which works harmoniously with brain and heart, and by means of which 
imagination and idealism are translated into fact. Without it, man’s intellectual superi- 
ority would be to a large extent unavailable. In its combination of strength with deli- 
cacy, it is an index of character in all its variations in man and woman from childhood to 
old age. It marks the refinement of high civilisation, no less than the dexterity and force 
of the skilled inventor and mechanician. In the art of the true portrait painter, as in 
works of Titian and Vandyke, the hand is no less replete with individuality than the face. 
The unpremeditated action of the orator harmonizes with his utterance; and at times the 
movements of his hands are scarcely less expressive than his tongue. 
It is not necessary to discuss the purely anatomical relations of the human hand to 
to the fore-limb of other animals; for, if the conclusions here set forth are correct, the 
special attribute now under discussion is not necessarily limited to man. But the practi- 
cal distinction lies in the fact that the most highly developed anthropoid, while in a sense 
four-handed, has no such delicate instrument of manipulation as that which distinguishes 
man from all other animals. In most monkeys there is a separate and movable thumb 
in all the four limbs. The characteristic whereby their hallux, or great toe, instead of 
being parallel with the others, and so adapted for standing and walking errect, has the 
power of action of a thumb, gives the prehensile character of a hand to the hind limb. 
This is not confined to the arboreal apes. It is found in the baboons and others that are 
mainly terrestrial in their habits, and employ the four limbs ordinarily in moving on the 
ground. 
Cuvier’s determination of a separate order for man as bimanous has been challenged. 
Man is, indeed, still admitted to form a single genus, Homo; but, in the levelling process 
of scientific revolution he has been relegated to a place in the same order with the 
monkeys and, possibly, the lemurs, which in the development of the thumb are more 
man-like than the apes. In reality, looking simply to man as thus compared with the 
highest anthropoid apes, the order of Quadrumana is more open to challenge than that of 
the Bimana. The hind-limb of the ape approaches anatomically much more to the human 
foot than the hand ; while the fore-limb is a true, though inferior, hand. The ape’s hind- 
limb is indeed prehensile, as is the foot of man in some small degree; but alike anatomi- 
Sec. IL. 1886. 1. 
