138 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
When engaged in some more general inquiries into the evidence of 
the preferential use of the right hand among modern savage races, I 
appealed to the experience of my friend Dr. John Rae, who, like my- 
self, is inveterately left-handed, to ascertain if he had noted any such 
habit among the Eskimos, or among the Indian tribes bordering on 
the Hudson’s Bay, among whom he long resided. In his reply he 
informs me that, without having taken particular notice of Indian or 
Eskimo preference for one or other hand, he observed that some 
among the lattér were markedly ambi-dextrous. But, he adds, 
“from a curious story told me by an Eskimo about a bear throwing 
a large piece of ice at the head of a walrus; and telling me, as a note- 
worthy fact, that he threw it with the left forepaw, as if it were 
something unusual, it would seem to indicate that left-handedness 
was not very common among the Eskimos.” 
So far as Mr. Cushing’s observations and experiments supply any 
satisfactory basis for the determination of the question as to the 
general prevalence of right-handedness, they point unmistakably to 
such a conclusion, and he definitely advances the opinion that, with 
few and rare exceptions, primitive man was right-handed. The evi- 
dence thus far adduced is insufficient for an absolute determination 
of the question ; but any strongly-marked examples of the left-handed 
workman’s art among palolithic flint implements appear to be ex- 
ceptional. No higher authority than Dr. John Evans can be 
appealed to in reference to the manipulations of the primitive flint- 
worker, and, in writing to me on the subject, he remarks: “ I think 
that there is some evidence of the flint-workers of old having been 
right-handed : the particular twist, both in some paleolithic imple- 
ments, as in one in my own possession, from Hoxne, in Suffolk, and 
in some American rifled arrow-heads, being due to the manner of 
chipping, and being most in accordance with their being held in the 
left hand and chipped with the right.” In the detailed description, 
given in his “ Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain,” of the 
Hoxne example above referred to, he remarks: “It presents the 
peculiarity, which is by no means uncommon in ovate implements, of 
having the side edges not in one plane, but forming a sort of ogee 
curve. In this instance the blade is twisted to such an extent, that 
a line drawn through the two edges near the point is at an angle of 
at least 45° to a line through the edges at the broadest part of the 
implement. I think,” he adds, “that this twisting of the edges was 
