HAND AND LEFT-HANDEDNESS. 17 
the walls of the same palace the great king appears with his staff in his right hand, while 
his left hand rests on the pommel of his sword. Behind him a eunuch holds in his right 
hand, over the king’s head, a fan or fly-flapper ; and so with other officers in attendance. 
Soldiers bear their swords and axes in the right hand, and their shields on the left arm. 
A prisoner is being flayed alive by an operator who holds the knife in the right hand. 
The king himself puts out the eyes of another captive, holding the spear in his right 
hand, while he retains in his left the end of a cord attached to his victim. Similar evi- 
dence abounds throughout the elaborate series of sculptures in the British Museum and in 
the Louvre. Everywhere gods and men are represented as “discerning between their 
right hand and their left,” and giving the preference to the former. 
It has been already shown that in languages of the American continent, es in 
those of the Algonquins and the Iroquois, the recognition of the distinction between the 
right and left hand is apparent; and on turning to the monuments of a native American 
civilisation, evidence similar to that derived from the sculptures of Egypt and Assyria 
serves to show that the same hand had the preference in the New World as in the Old. 
In the Palenque hieroglyphics of Central America, for example, in which human and 
animal heads frequently occur among the sculptured characters, it is noticeable that they 
invariably look towards the left, indicating, as it appears to me, that they are the graven 
inscriptions of a lettered people, who were accustomed to write the same characters from 
left to right on paper or skins. Indeed, the pictorial groups on the Copan statues seem to : 
be the true hieroglyphic characters; while the Palenque inscriptions correspond to the 
abbreviated hieratic writing. The direction of the profile was a matter of no moment to 
the sculptor, but if the scribe held his pen or style in his right hand, like the modern 
clerk, he would as naturally draw the left profile as the penman slopes his current hand 
to the right. In the pictorial hieroglyphics, reproduced in Lord Kingsborough’s “ Mexican 
Antiquities,” as in other illustrations of the arts of Mexico and Central America, it is also 
apparent that the battle-axe and other weapons and implements are most frequently held 
in the right hand. But to this exceptions occur; and it is obvious that there, also, the 
crude perspective of the artist influenced the disposition of the tools, or weapons, 
according to the action designed to be represented, and the direction in which the actor 
looked. 
Such are some of the indications which seem to point to a uniform usage, in so far as 
we can recover evidence of the practice among ancient nations. But far behind their most 
venerable records lie the chronicles of Paleolithic ages: of the men of the drift and of 
the caves of Europe’s prehistoric dawn. “I wonder,” says Carlyle, when the deprivation 
of the use of his right hand forced this enquiry on his special notice, “I wonder if there 
is any people barbarous enough not to have this distinction of hands; no human Cosmos 
possible to be even begun without it.” It need not, therefore, surprise us that evidence 
is now adduced which seems to prove that the draftsmen of European’s Paleolithic Era 
gave the preference to the right hand ; and that the flint implements of the drift reveal, 
by the direction of the grooves produced on their surface in the process of flaking, that 
their manufacturers were also, with rare exceptions, right-handed. 
The troglodyte of Europe’s Paleolithic dawn has transmitted to us his ingenious 
works as a draftsman ; and in the graphic representations of the mammoth, the reindeer, 
the fossil horse, and others of the contemporary fauna, which have been preserved through 
Sec. IL, 1886. 3. 
