20 RIGHT AND LEFT 



draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find 

 it requires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. 

 The hand moves of its own accord from without inward, 

 not from within outward. Then, again, draw with your 

 left thumb and forefinger another imaginary profile, and 

 you will find, for the same reason, that the face in this case 

 looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young 

 children, whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of 

 man or beast, with their right hand, draAV it almost always 

 with the face or head turned to the left, in accordance with 

 this natural human instinct. Their doing so is a test of 

 their perfect right-handedness. 



But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive 

 men we know personally, the carvers of the figures from 

 the French bone-caves, drew men and beasts, on bone or 

 mammoth-tusk, turned either way indiscriminately. The 

 inference is obvious. They must have been ambidextrous. 

 Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day ; and 

 indeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp fiint on a 

 piece of bone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a 

 practised hand, be comparatively difficult. 



I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with 

 this one very clear historical datum, because it is interest- 

 ing to be able to say with tolerable certainty that there 

 really was a period in our life as a species when man in 

 the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he become 

 otherwise? This question is not only of importance in 

 itself, as helping to explain the origin and source of man's 

 supremacy in nature — his tool-using faculty — but it is also 

 of interest from the light it casts on that fallacy of poor 

 Charles Eeade's already alluded to — that we ought all of us 

 in this respect to hark back to the condition of savages. I 

 think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised 

 man now right-handed, we shall also see why it would be 



