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. CHAPTER II THE EDUCATED HAND THE reign of law is a phrase comprehensive enough to embrace many points of minor import; and among those assigned to its sway the prevalent habit of right-handedness has been recognised as one of too familiar experience to seem to stand in need of further explanation. It has been accepted as the normal usage and law of action common to the whole race; and so no more in need of any special reason for its existence than any other function of the hand. Nevertheless it has not wholly eluded investigation; nor is it surprising that the exceptional but strongly marked deviations from the normal law should have attracted the notice of thoughtful observers to the question of right-handedness as a curious and unsolved problem. A philosophic speculator of the seventeenth century, the famous old Norwich physician, Sir Thomas Browne, reverts characteristically to the mystic fancies of the Talmud for guidance, as he turns to the question in its simplest aspect, and quaintly ignores the existence of its foundation. With his strong bent towards Platonic mysticism, this question, like other and higher speculations with which he dallied, presented itself in relation to what may well be called "first principles," as an undetermined problem. Whether," says he in his Religio Medici, "Eve was framed out of the left side of Adam, I dispute not, because I stand not yet assured which is the right side of a man, or whether there be any such distinction in nature." That there is a right side in man is a postulate not likely to be seriously disputed; but whether there is such a distinction in nature remains still unsettled two centuries and a half after the inquiry was thus started. The same question was forced on the attention of an eminent philosophic speculator of our own day, under circumstances that involved a practical realisation of its significance. Towards the close of a long life in which Thomas Carlyle had unceasingly plied his busy pen, the dexterous right hand, that had un |