128 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
extended our knowledge of the history of the human race ; and have 
opened vistas through which we already look on many novel revela- 
tions such as, at no very distant period, it would have seemed folly 
to imagine possible. Weare as yet but on the threshold of such dis- 
closures, and only imperfectly interpret the new chronicle. But 
among those already suggested by its study, one subordinate illustra_ 
tion of attributes characteristic of primitive man appears to be the 
evidence that among the paleolithic workers in flint, and the 
singularly gifted, draftsmen of Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer 
periods, a preferential use of the right hand prevailed nearly as 
much as in historic times. The remoteness of such evidence, and its 
manifest freedom from all the artificial influences of civilization, give 
it a special value in any attempt to determine the source of right- 
handedness. No human cosmos, as Carlyle says, can by any possi- 
bility be even begun without this distinction of hands ; and yet the 
precise cause of the nearly universal preference of the right hand 
appears to elude alike the research of the historian and the investiga- 
tions of the physiologist. 
The classification of man, apart from all other animals, as a 
separate order of Bumana, though no longer accepted as one fulfilling 
the requirements of science, is an indication of the characteristic 
significance attached to the human hand. It is an organ so delicate- 
ly fashioned, and, in the daily actions of life employed with such re- 
markable skill in all the multifarious requirements of the soldier and 
seaman, the skilled artizan, the needlewoman, the clerk, the surgeon, 
the artist, musician, d&c., that the biologist was not unnaturally 
directed to it when in search of a typical basis of classification. By 
reason of its mobility and its articulated structure, it is specially 
adapted as an organ of touch ; and the fine sense which education 
confers on it tends still further to widen the difference between the 
human hand and that of the ape. But also, whether solely as a re- 
sult of education, or traceable to some organic difference, the delicacy 
of the sense of touch, and the manipulative skill and mobility of the 
right hand, in the majority of cases, is found so far to exceed that of 
the left that a term borrowed from the former expresses the general 
idea of dexterity. That education has largely extended the preferen- 
tial use of the right hand is undoubted. That it has even tended to 
unduly displace the left hand from the exercise of its manipulative 
function, I fully believe. But so far as appears, in the preference 
