ACQITIRED DIFFERENCES. IB 



advantages would be great both as regards security from 

 loss and the probable gain in intellectual energy. There 

 is strong evidence that in young persons the destruction 

 of the speech centre in the left hemisphere, while causing 

 loss of the faculty for a time, may be recovered from by 

 the education of the right centre. A case is recorded in 

 which this occurred, and when the centre on the right, 

 which had thus been educated, was, by a strange and 

 lamentable chance itself destroyed, the speech faculty 

 vanished finally. In middle and advanced life recovery 

 of the faculty does not occur. We know that left handed 

 people can be made by education almost ambidexterous, 

 but we don't know yet whether or not in such persons the 

 speech and thought centres develop on both sides ; it is 

 quite possible that they do. 



These facts render it likely that our present condition 

 as left brained people, while to a large extent fixed by the 

 influence of a long heredity, is not absolute and in- 

 evitable; it seems possible that if mankind paid more 

 attention to the right hemisphere by using and training 

 the left hand and eye and by practising the art of 

 writing and drawing with the left hand, we might greatly 

 augment the nerve energy, the power of memory and the 

 intellectual faculty generally of our race, while at the 

 same time lessening the risk which attends over use and 

 over strain of one organ, and also providing a duplicate 

 nerve mechanism as a sort of insurance against the 

 accident of disease. 



Unhappily the influence of education and of educators 

 is at present in the main thrown into the other scale. 

 This question is a large, and, I think, a highly important 

 one ; it is one on which, in the present stage of knowledge, 

 I do not like to dogmatise too strongly ; I leave it for your 

 consideration. 



