slight effort is necessary to enable him to use the pen freely with it. An apt illustration of this has been communicated to me by the manager of one of the Canadian banks. He had occasion to complain of the letters of one of his local agents as at times troublesome to decipher, and instructed him in certain cases to dictate to a junior clerk who wrote a clear, legible hand. The letters subsequently sent to the manager, though transmitted to him by the same agent, presented in signature, as in all else, a totally different caligraphy. The change of signature led to inquiry; when it turned out that his correspondent was left-handed, and by merely shifting the pen to the more dexterous hand, he was able, with a very little practice, to substitute for the old cramped penmanship an upright, rounded, neat, and very legible handwriting.

In reference to the question of hereditary transmission, the evidence, as in the case of Dr. Rae, is undoubted. Dr. R. A. Reeve, in whom also the original left-handedness has given place to a nearly equal facility with both hands, informs me that his father was left-handed. Again Dr. Pye-Smith quotes from the Lancet of October 1870 the case of Mr. R. A. Lithgow, who writes to say that he himself,

L

his father, and his grandfather have all been lefthanded. This accords with the statement of M.

Ribot in his Heredity. "There are," he says, "families in which the special use of the left hand is hereditary. Girou mentions a family in which the father, the children, and most of the grandchildren were left-handed. One of the latter betrayed its left-handedness from earliest infancy, nor could it be broken off the habit, though the left hand was bound and swathed." Such persistent left-handedness is not, indeed, rare. In an instance communicated to me, both of the parents of a gentleman in Shropshire were left-handed. His mother, accordingly, watched his early manifestations of the same tendency, and employed every available means to counteract it. His left hand was bound up or tied behind him ; and this was persevered in until it was feared that the left arm had been permanently injured. Yet all proved vain. The boy resumed the use of the left hand as soon as the restraint was removed; and though learning like others to use his right hand with facility in the use of the pen, and in other cases in which custom enforces compliance with the practice of the majority, he remained inveterately left-handed. Again a Canadian friend, whose sister-in-law is left-handed,

thus writes to me: 'I never heard of any of the rest of the family who were so; but one of her brothers had much more than the usual facility in using both hands, and in paddling, chopping, etc., used to shift about the implement from one hand to the other in a way which I envied. As to my sister-in-law, she had great advantages from her left-handedness. She was a very good performer on the piano, and her bass was magnificent. If there was a part to be taken only with one hand, she used to take the left as often as the right. But it was at needlework that I watched her with the greatest interest. If she was cutting out, she used to shift the scissors from one hand to the other; and would have employed the left hand more, were it not that all scissors, as she complained, are made right-handed, and she wished, if possible, to procure a left-handed pair. So also with the needle, she used the right hand generally; but in many delicate little operations her habit was to shift it to the left hand."

In those and similar cases, the fact is illustrated that the left-handed person is necessarily ambidextrous. He has the exceptional " dexterity" resulting from the special organic aptitude of the left hand, which is only paralleled in those cases of true

right-handedness where a corresponding organic aptitude is innate. Education, enforced by the usage of the majority, begets for him the training of the other and less facile hand; while by an unwise neglect the majority of mankind are content to leave the left hand as an untrained and merely supplementary organ. From the days of the seven hundred chosen men of the tribe of Benjamin, the left-handed have been noted for their skill; and this has been repeatedly manifested by artists. Foremost among such stands Leonardo da Vinci, skilled as musician, painter, and mathematician, and accomplished in all the manly sports of his age. Hans Holbein, Mozzo of Antwerp, Amico Aspertino, and Ludovico Cangiago, were all left-handed, though the two latter are described as working equally well with both hands. In all the fine arts the mastery of both hands is advantageous; and accordingly the left-handed artist, with his congenital skill and his cultivated dexterity, has the advantage of his right-handed rival, instead of, as is frequently assumed, starting at a disadvantage.

CHAPTER X

CONFLICT OF THEORIES

IT now remains to consider the source to which the preferential use of the right hand is to be ascribed. The dominant influence of the one cerebral hemisphere in relation to the discharge of nerve force to the opposite side of the body is a fact which is now familiar to the physiologist, and the influence of the left cerebral hemisphere on the action of the right hand has already been alluded to. But this extremely probable source of right-handedness long eluded inquirers, as will be seen from a résumé of the various hypotheses suggested by eminent anatomists and physiologists. A very slight consideration of the evidence already adduced in proof of the same prevalent usage from earliest times precludes the idea of its origin in any mere prescribed custom,