[Illustration: NATURE SERIES]
THE RIGHT HAND:
LEFT-HANDEDNESS
[Illustration]
_NATURE SERIES_
THE RIGHT HAND:
LEFT-HANDEDNESS
BY
SIR DANIEL WILSON, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
AUTHOR OF ‘THE PREHISTORIC ANNALS OF SCOTLAND’
‘PREHISTORIC MAN: RESEARCHES INTO THE
ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION,’ ETC.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1891
_All rights reserved_
TO
HIS GRANDSON
OSWALD GEORGE WILSON BELL
THIS LITTLE VOLUME
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
The following treatise includes data originally accumulated in a
series of papers communicated to the Canadian Institute and the Royal
Society of Canada, aiming at determining the cause of Left-handedness
by a review of its history in its archæological, philological, and
physiological aspects. In revising the materials thus accumulated in
illustration of the subject, with a view to their publication in a
connected form, the results of later investigation have been embodied
here, not only with the aim of tracing Left-handedness to its true
source, and thereby proving the folly of persistently striving to
suppress an innate faculty of exceptional aptitude, but also to enforce
the advantages to be derived by all from a systematic cultivation of
dexterity in both hands.
BENCOSIE, TORONTO,
_24th April 1891_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE HAND 1
CHAPTER II
THE EDUCATED HAND 12
CHAPTER III
THE WILLING HAND 23
CHAPTER IV
PALÆOLITHIC DEXTERITY 31
CHAPTER V
THE DISHONOURED HAND 62
CHAPTER VI
THE PRIMITIVE ABACUS 77
CHAPTER VII
THE COMPASS POINTS 89
CHAPTER VIII
HANDWRITING 97
CHAPTER IX
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL ACTION 119
CHAPTER X
CONFLICT OF THEORIES 149
CHAPTER XI
HAND AND BRAIN 183
CHAPTER I
THE HAND
The hand is one of the most distinctive characteristics of man. Without
its special organisation he would be for all practical purposes
inferior to many other animals. It is the executive portion of the
upper limb whereby the limits of his capacity as “the tool-user” are
determined. As such, it is the active agent of the primary sense of
touch, the organ of the will, the instrument which works harmoniously
with brain and heart, and by means of which imagination and idealism
are translated into fact. Without it man’s intellectual superiority
would be to a large extent abortive. In its combination of strength
with delicacy, it is an index of character in all its variations
in man and woman from childhood to old age. It is an exponent of
the refinement of high civilisation, no less than the organ of all
dexterity and force of the skilled inventor and mechanician. In the art
of the true painter, as in works of Titian and Vandyke, the portraiture
of the hand is no less replete with individuality than the face.
In so far as the hand is to be recognised as the organ of touch or
feeling, it plays a different part from the other organs of the senses.
It is no mere passive recipient of impressions, but selects the objects
to be subjected to its discrimination, and communicates the results
to the central organ: the seat of intelligence. As a responsive
agent of the mind it is the productive artificer. In its independent
estimate of form and texture it performs for all of us the function
of sight in the darkness; and to the blind it is an eye wherewith
they are enabled to receive correct impressions of external nature,
and to read for themselves the lettered page. The hand, moreover, has
an utterance of its own. The unpremeditated actions of the orator
harmoniously emphasise his speech; and in strong emotional excitement,
the movements of the hands are scarcely less expressive than the
tongue. There are, indeed, occasions when its symbolic speech needs
no audible accompaniment. The repelling action of the out-stretched
palm, accompanied by the averted head, can dispense with words; and
the hand in benediction has no need of them. The imagination realises
the amplest significance of such gestures, as in the final parting of
Arthur and Guinevere--
She in the darkness o’er her fallen head
Perceived the waving of his hands that blest.
In discussing the specialty of right-handedness, either as an expansion
or limitation of the use of the hand, it is not necessary to enlarge on
the distinctive anatomical relations of the human hand to the fore-limb
of other animals; for if the final results here set forth are correct,
the preferential and instinctive employment of one limb and extremity
is not an exclusive attribute of man. Nevertheless the hand is one
of the most characteristic human features. The practical distinction
between man and any approximate living creature lies in the fact that
the most highly developed anthropoid, while in a sense four-handed, has
no such delicate instrument of manipulation as that which distinguishes
man from all other animals. In most monkeys there is a separate and
movable thumb in all the four limbs. The characteristic whereby their
hallux, or great toe, instead of being parallel with the others, and so
adapted for standing and walking erect, has the power of action of a
thumb, gives the prehensile character of a hand to the hind-limb. This
is not confined to the arboreal apes. It is found in the baboons and
others that are mainly terrestrial in their habits, and employ the four
limbs ordinarily in moving on the ground.
The human hand is an organ so delicately fashioned that the biologist
has, not unnaturally, turned to it in search of a typical structural
significance. By reason of its mobility and its articulated structure,
it is specially adapted to be an organ of touch; and the fine sense
which education confers on it tends still further to widen the
difference between the human hand and that of the ape. Hence Cuvier’s
long-accepted determination of a separate order for man as bimanous.
But this classification is no longer tenable. Man is, indeed, still
admitted to form a single genus, _Homo_; but in the levelling process
of scientific revolution he has been relegated to a place in the
same order with the monkeys and, possibly, the lemurs, which in the
development of the thumb are more manlike than the apes. In reality,
looking simply to man as thus compared with the highest anthropoid
apes, the order of Quadrumana is more open to challenge than that of
the Bimana. The hind-limb of the ape approaches anatomically much more
to the human foot than the hand; while the fore-limb is a true though
inferior hand. The ape’s hind-limb is indeed prehensile, as is the
foot of man in some degree; but alike anatomically and physiologically
the fore-limb of the ape, like the hand of man, is the prehensile
organ _par excellence_; while the primary function of the hind-limb is
locomotion.
There are unquestionably traces of prehensile capacity in the human
foot; and even of remarkable adaptability to certain functions of the
hand. Well-known cases have occurred of persons born without hands, or
early deprived of them, learning to use their feet in many delicate
operations, including not only the employment of pen and pencil, but
the use of scissors, with a facility which demonstrates the latent
capacity for separate action of the great toe, and its thumblike
apposition to the others. In 1882 I witnessed, in the Museum at
Antwerp, an artist without arms skilfully use his brushes with his
right foot. He employed it with great ease, arranging his materials,
opening his box of colours, selecting and compressing his tubes,
and “handling” his brush, seemingly with a dexterity fully equal to
that of his more favoured rivals. At an earlier date, during a visit
to Boston, I had an opportunity of observing a woman, under similar
disadvantages, execute elaborate pieces of scissor-work, and write not
only with neatness, but with great rapidity. Nevertheless the human
foot, in its perfect natural development, is not a hand. The small
size of the toes as compared with the fingers, and the position and
movements of the great toe, alike point to diverse functions and a
greatly more limited range of action. But the capacity of the system of
muscles of the foot--scarcely less elaborate than that of the hand,--is
obscured to us by the rigid restraints of the modern shoe. The power of
voluntary action in the toes manifests itself not only in cases where
early mutilation, or malformation at birth, compels the substitution
of the foot for the hand; but among savages, where the unshackled
foot is in constant use in climbing and feeling its way through brake
and jungle, the free use of the toes, and the power of separating
the great toe from the others, are retained in the same way as may be
seen in the involuntary movements of a healthy child. When camping out
in long vacation holidays in the Canadian wilds, repeated experience
has proved to me that the substitution for a few weeks of the soft,
yielding deerskin moccasin of the Indian, in place of the rigid shoe,
restores even to the unpractised foot of civilised man a freedom of
action in the toes, a discriminating sense of touch, and a capacity for
grasping rock or tree in walking or climbing, of which he has had no
previous conception. The Australian picks up his spear with the naked
foot; and the moccasin of the American Indian scarcely diminishes the
like capacity to take hold of stick or stone. The Hindu tailor, in like
manner, sits on the ground holding the cloth tightly stretched with his
toes, while both hands are engaged in the work of the needle.
Such facts justify the biologist in regarding this element of
structural difference between man and the apes as inadequate for the
determination of a specific zoological classification. Nevertheless man
still stands apart as the tool-maker, the tool-user, the manipulator.
A comparison between the fore and hind limbs of the Chimpanzee, or
other ape, leaves the observer in doubt whether to name them alike as
hands or feet, both being locomotive as well as prehensile organs;
whereas the difference between the hand and foot of man is obvious,
and points to essentially diverse functions. The short, weak thumb,
the long, nearly uniform fingers, and the inferior play of the wrist
in the monkey, are in no degree to be regarded as defects. They are
advantageous to the tree-climber, and pertain to its hand as an organ
of locomotion; whereas the absence of such qualities in the human hand
secures its permanent delicacy of touch, and its general adaptation for
many manipulative purposes.
The hand of man is thus eminently adapted to be the instrument for
translating the conceptions of intelligent volition into concrete
results. Dr. George Wilson in his fine prose poem: “The Five Gateways
of Knowledge,” speaks of it as giving expression “to the genius and the
wit, the courage and the affection, the will and the power of man....
The term handicraftsman or hand-worker belongs to all honest, earnest
men and women, and is a title which each should covet. For the Queen’s
hand there is the sceptre, and for the soldier’s hand the sword; for
the carpenter’s hand the saw, and for the smith’s hand the hammer;
for the farmer’s hand the plough, for the miner’s hand the spade,
for the sailor’s hand the oar, for the painter’s hand the brush, for
the sculptor’s hand the chisel, for the poet’s hand the pen, and for
the woman’s hand the needle. If none of these, or the like, will fit
us, the felon’s chain should be round our wrist, and our hand on the
prisoner’s crank. But for each willing man and woman there is a tool
they may learn to handle; for all there is the command: ‘Whatsoever thy
hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’”
Other animals have their implements for constructive skill, and their
weapons, offensive and defensive, as parts of their organic being; and
are armed, equipped, clad, and mailed by no effort of their own. But
man, inferior to all in offensive and defensive appliances, is a match
for his most formidable assailants by means of appliances furnished
by his dexterous hand in obedience to the promptings of intelligent
volition.
The matured capacity of the hand is the necessary concomitant of man’s
intellectual development; not only enabling him to fashion all needful
tools, and to place at a disadvantage the fiercest of his assailants
armed by nature with formidable weapons of assault; but also to respond
no less effectually to every prompting of the æsthetic faculty in
the most delicate artistic creations. The very arts of the ingenious
nest-makers, the instinctive weavers or builders, the spider, the
bee, the ant, or the beaver, place them in striking contrast to man
in relation to his handiwork. He alone, in the strict sense of the
term, is a manufacturer. The Quadrumana, though next to man in the
approximation of their fore-limbs to hands, claim no place among the
instinctive architects, weavers, or spinners. The human hand, as an
instrument of constructive design or artistic skill, ranks wholly apart
from all the organs employed in the production of analogous work among
the lower animals. The hand of the ape accomplishes nothing akin to
the masonry of the swallow, or the damming and building of the beaver.
But, imperfect though it seems, it suffices for all requirements of
the forest-dweller. In climbing trees, in gathering and shelling nuts
or pods, opening shell-fish, tearing off the rind of fruit, or pulling
up roots; in picking out thorns or burs from its own fur, or in the
favourite occupation of hunting for each other’s parasites: the monkey
uses the finger and thumb; and in many other operations performs with
the hand what is executed by the quadruped or bird less effectually
by means of the mouth or bill. At first sight we might be tempted to
assume that the quadrumanous mammal had the advantage of us, as there
are certainly many occasions when an extra hand could be turned to
useful account. But not only do man’s two hands prove greatly more
serviceable for all higher purposes of manipulation than the four hands
of the ape: a further specialty distinguishing him as he rises in the
scale of intellectual superiority is that he seems to widen still
more the divergence from the quadrumanous anthropoid by converting
one hand into the favoured organ and servant of his will, while the
other is relegated to a wholly subordinate place as its mere help and
supplement.