EIGHT AND LEFT 21 



highly undesirable for him to return, after so many ages 

 of practice, to the condition of his undeveloped stone-age 

 ancestors. 



The very beginning of our modern right-handedness 

 goes back, indeed, to the most primitive savagery. Why 

 did one hand ever come to be different in use and function 

 from another ? The answer is, because man, in spite of all 

 appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally, 

 indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn't show : but 

 it shows internally. We all of us know, in spite of 

 Sganarelle's assertion to the contrary, that the apex of the 

 heart inclines to the left side, and that the liver and other 

 internal organs show a generous disregard for strict and 

 formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those 

 human organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get 

 the clue to the irregularity of right and left in the human 

 arm, and finally even the particular direction of the printed 

 letters now before you. 



For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His 

 manners were strikingly deficient in that repose which 

 stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. When primitive man 

 felt the tender passion steal over his soul, he lay in wait in 

 the bush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms had in- 

 spired his heart with young desire ; and when she passed 

 his hiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled 

 her with a club, caught her tight by the hair of her head, 

 and dragged her off in triumph to his cave or his rock- 

 shelter. (Marriage by capture, the learned call this simple 

 mode of primeval courtship.) When he found some 

 Strephon or Damoetas rival him in the affections of the 

 dusky sex, he and that rival fought the matter out like two 

 bulls in a field ; and the victor and his Phyllis supped that 

 evening off the roasted remains of the vanquished suitor. 

 I don't say these habits and manners were pretty ; but they 



