128 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



extended our knowledge of the history of the hximan race ; and have 

 opened vistas through which we already look on many novel revela- 

 tions such as, at no very distant period, it would have seemed folly 

 to imagine possible. We are as yet but on the threshold of such dis- 

 closures, and only imperfectly interpret the new chronicle. But 

 among those already suggested by its study, one subordinate illustra. 

 tion of attributes characteristic of primitive man appears to be the 

 evidence that among the palaeolithic workers in flint, and the 

 singularly gifted draftsmen of Europe's Mammoth and Reindeer 

 periods, a preferential use of the right hand prevailed nearly as 

 much as in historic times. The remoteness of such evidence, and its 

 manifest freedom from all the artificial influences of civilization, give 

 it a special value in any attempt to deteimine the source of right- 

 handedness. No human cosmos, as Carlyle says, can by any possi- 

 bility be even begun without this distinction of hands ; and yet the 

 precise cause of the nearly universal preference of the right hand 

 appears to elude alike the research of the historian and the investiga- 

 tions of the physiologist. 



The classification of man, apart from all other animals, as a 

 separate order of Bimana, though no longer accepted as one fulfilling 

 the requii-ements of science, is an indication of the characteristic 

 significance attached to the human hand. It is an organ so delicate- 

 ly fashioned, and, in the daily actions of life employed with such re- 

 markable skill in all the multifarious requirements of the soldier and 

 seaman, the skilled artizan, the needlewoman, the clerk, the surgeon 

 the artist, musician, &c., that the biologist was not unnaturally 

 directed to it when in search of a typical basis of classification. By 

 reason of its mobility and its articulated structure, it is specially 

 adapted as an organ of touch ; and the fine sense which education 

 confers on it tends still further to widen the difference between the 

 huraan hand and that of the ape. But also, whether solely as a re- 

 sult of education, or traceable to some organic difierence, the delicacy 

 of the sense of touch, and the manipulative skill and mobility of the 

 right hand, in the majority of cases, is found so far to exceed that of 

 the left that a term borrowed from the former expresses the general 

 idea of dexterity. That education has largely extended the preferen- 

 tial use of the right hand is undoubted. That it has even tended to 

 unduly displace the left hand from the exercise of its manipulative 

 function, I fully believe. But so far as appears, in the preference 



