EIGHT AND LEFT 23 



the very word ' dexterity ' implies this fact made it more 

 natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the 

 same hand preferentially in the manufacture of flint 

 hatchets, bows and arrows, and in all the other manifold 

 activities of savage life. It was the hand with which he 

 grasped his weapon ; it was therefore the hand with which 

 he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right hand 

 remains especially ' the hand in which you hold your 

 knife ; ' and that is exactly how our own children to this 

 day decide the question which is which, when they begin 

 to know their right hand from their left for practical pur- 

 poses. 



A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter 

 innumerable other differences which naturally flow from it. 

 Some of them are extremely remote and derivative. Take, 

 for example, the case of writing and printing. Why do 

 these" run from left to right ? At first sight such a practice 

 seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticed 

 above the tendency to draw from right to left, in accord- 

 ance with the natural sweep of the hand and arm. And, 

 indeed, it is a fact that all early writing habitually took 

 the opposite direction from that which is now universal in 

 western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance 

 (or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay 

 standard), that Hebrew is written from right to left, and 

 that each book begins at the wrong cover. The reason is 

 that words, and letters, and hieroglyphics were originally 

 carved, scratched, or incised, instead of being written with 

 coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to follow its 

 natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in naive drawing, 

 with a free curve from the right leftward. 



Nevertheless, the very same fact that we use the right 

 hand alone in writing made the letters run the opposite 

 way in the end ; and the change was due to the use of ink 



