SCIENCIMLETTER FROM PARIS. 802: 
Koran enjoins that the right hand ought to remain motionless when writing. 
Easterns could never have written with the left hand, for that hand has ever 
ranked as impure. No Turk strokes his beard with the left hand, or employs it to 
receive food, and to present that to be shaken, ranks in the eyes of westerns as 
an insult. With a Semitic, every religious action is accomplished with the face 
turned toward the east; his prayer would be worthless if uttered in any other 
position; he observes the same rule in writing, so that the light arrives from the 
south, and he writes from that point to shadeward. Westerns receive the light 
on the left side, and curiously enough, write also toward the shade. Both are 
physiologically correct in not writing in full light. A singular fact to note: an 
individual struck with paralysis, experiences ever afterward an inability to pro- 
nounce certain letters, 4, J, 7, for example; the correlation will extend to the in- 
capacity to write these letters, a simple crook is at most all that can represent 
them. Naturally, as observed, the right hand predominates; this was the case 
in the time of Homer’s heroes, and was so with their ancestors; and modern: 
man writes easily, and as rapidly, as a musician’s fingers move unconsciously, be- 
cause the images or letters are stored in the left hemisphere of tne brain. Left- 
handed penmanship is only right-hand writing topsy-turvy; this explains the ec- 
centricity of Leonard de Vinci’s explanations of his designs, and that puzzle so 
many persons; he wrote upside down at an early age, and continued the freak 
when residing in France. Many lithographers at present write on the stone with 
the left hand and draw with the right. 
Professor Vogt concludes, that the position of the lines in writing and recip- 
rocal arrangement of the letters, depend on no physiological necessity. 
M. Hébert has been studying what was formerly the geologic condition of 
the Straits of Dover, and concludes that during the first phase the tertiary pe- 
riod, a part of the Straits was covered by the German ocean, which communi- 
cated with the basin of Paris by the plains of Artois, while it also extended to. 
Belgium, Westphalia and Hanover. He fixes the opening of the Straits, during 
the quaternary period. 
Professor Daubrée claims for Descartes, the honor of being one of the cre- 
ators of cosmology and geolozy, he had been replaced by Newton and Voltaire. 
Before Laplace, Descartes cousidered all celestial phenomena as simple deduc- 
tions from the laws of the mechanics; he proclaimed the physical unity of the 
universe, before the spectroscope had revealed the chemical composition of the 
most distant worlds, and that the earth and the heavens are made of the same 
matter. Heat, according to Descartes, played a réle capital in the formation of 
our globe, which was at one time a star, differing in nothing from the sun, save 
in being smaller, and that the dislocations in celestial vault have been produced 
by coolingsand contractions. The idea that igneous, or crystallized rocks were at 
one time stratified till coming in contact with the internal heat of the globe, they 
became volcanic, has been abandoned since the explorations of Humboldt in the 
Andes, and of De Buch in Norway; the latter found crystalline rocks lying over 
