60 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 
our school system, part of whose business it is to develop 
manual skill and facilitation. The lamentable inefficiency 
of our methods of instructing this large group was vividly 
brought to the writer’s attention in a recent survey of the 
handwriting problems and achievements of some 300 left- 
handed children in the public schools of the city of 
Chicago. The hand writing was, quite naturally, very 
much inferior to that of the right-handed pupils, but 
more significant was the fact that these unfortunate 
left-handed ones invariable received less help from their 
teachers than their right-handed neighbors, not to men- 
tion such additional disadvantages as cramped, unhy- 
gienic postures arising out of an attempt to adjust to light 
and desk arrangements adapted to the needs of the right- 
handed. In the absence of anything authoritative from 
physiology and psychology the teacher is naturally left 
to her own rule of thumb procedure in such cases, and 
this procedure, strangely enough is to “break”’ the pupil 
of his left-handedness by forcing the use of his right hand. 
When this fails the pupil is regarded as mentally incor- 
rigible and is left to his own resources. 
There is another aberration known in this field as 
“mirror writing.” It is left-handwriting executed by 
an exact reduplication of the movements of the right 
hand, in a symmetrical way from the central point in 
front of the body out toward the left. This writing 
becomes legible and is like right-hand writing when seen 
in a mirror. -In the writer’s investigation of this aspect 
which canvasses a total school population of 106,000 
children, he found only 42 bona fide cases of “‘mirror- 
writing.” In the course of an intensive study of several 
typical cases, it was brought out that teachers and par- 
ents alike regarded the phenoménon as somewhat of a 
sub normal, criminal tendency. Invariable the method of 
correction was by the use of force. 
Some evidence exists, also, which although small is 
by no means negligible, that the forced changing of chil- 
dren from their native left-handedness to right-handed- 
ness after speech and writing have become more or less 
habitual, results in certain speech defects, such as stam- 
mering, stuttering, and even some of the more complex 
aphasias. The explanation of this is based upon the 
