The right hand

Archæology has undertaken novel duties as the handmaid of history. With its aid we have acquired more definite ideas of the men of Western Europe in its pleistocene or quaternary epoch than we possess of the contemporaries of Greece and Rome in the centuries preceding the Christian era. The huge cave-bear, the cave-lion, with their more formidable congener, the sabre-toothed Machairodus latidens, preyed on the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the reindeer, musk-sheep, and other fauna of a semi-arctic climate; and the men of that same epoch, while still ignorant of the very rudiments of metallurgy, fashioned for themselves sufficiently effective weapons to contend successfully with the fiercest of the carnivora, and secure for their own use the spoils of the chase. Palæolithic man made his home in the deserted rock-shelters and caves of the hyæna and cave-bear; and in spite of the privations of a rigorous climate, found leisure not only to fashion his ingenious tools, but to indulge a taste for art, alike in carving and in etching on ivory and stone, to an extent altogether remarkable when the whole attendant circumstances are duly estimated. Specimens of those primitive works of art, including ingenious carvings in bone and ivory, and lances, daggers of deers’ horn, maces and batons carved in bone, and decorated in some cases with artistic skill, have been recovered from the cave-drift, or more securely sealed up in the cave-breccia. The evidences of skill are unmistakable. Within the last thirty years repeated discoveries of such ancient cave-dwellings, and the investigation of their contents, have familiarised us with the workmanship of their primitive artificers. The evidence which these ingenious products furnish in proof of the dexterity of the ancient cave-men, in the more comprehensive sense of that term, is universally recognised; but my attention was first directed to the possible clue which they might furnish to the prevalent use of one or other hand in that remote age, by what on further investigation proved to be an error in the reproduction of the famous drawing of the mammoth on a plate of its own ivory, found in La Madelaine Cave, in the Valley of the Vézère. In M. Louis Figuier’s L’Homme Primitif, for example, which might be assumed as a reliable authority in reference to the illustrative examples of French palæolithic art, the La Madelaine Cave sketch is incorrectly reproduced as a left-hand drawing; that is to say, the mammoth is looking to the right. This is a nearly unerring test of right or left-handedness. The skilled artist can, no doubt, execute a right or left profile at his will. But an unpremeditated profile-drawing, if done by a right-handed draftsman, will be represented looking to the left; as, if it is the work of a left-handed draftsman, it will certainly look to the right.

The drawings of those contemporaries of the mammoth and other extinct fauna of Europe have naturally excited attention on various grounds. They furnish no uncertain evidence of the intellectual status of the men of that remote age who constituted the population of Southern France, and of neighbouring regions, under climatic conditions contrasting as strangely with those of the sunny land of the vine and the olive, as did the contemporary fauna and flora with those of Guyenne or Gascony at the present day. Any evidence therefore of their mode of working derived from their carvings and drawings has a special bearing on an inquiry into the antiquity and assumed universality of an instinctive habit.

The examples of primitive art are of varying degrees of merit. Some of them may be compared to the first efforts of an untutored youth; while others, such as the La Madelaine mammoth and the grazing reindeer from Thayngen, show the practised hand of a skilled draftsman. Among the fanciful illustrations introduced by M. Louis Figuier in his L’Homme Primitif is a picture showing the arts of drawing and sculpture as practised during the reindeer epoch. Three men of fine physique, slightly clad in skins, stand or recline in easy attitudes, sketching or carving as a modern artist might do in the lighter hours of his practice. One stands and sketches a deer, with free hand, on a piece of slate, which rests against a ledge of rock as his easel. Another, seated at his ease, traces a miniature device with, it may be, a pointed flint, on a slab of bone or ivory. The third is apparently carving or modelling a deer or other quadruped. All are, as a matter of course, represented with the stylus, graver, or modelling tool in the right hand, the question of possible left-handedness not having occurred to the modern draftsman.

All experience points to the conclusion that the primitive artificer habitually used one hand, whether the right or the left. Even when the naturally left-handed have acquired such facility in the use of the right hand, by persevering compliance with the usage of the majority in many customary practices of daily life, as to be practically ambidextrous, each hand is still employed by instinctive preference in certain definite acts; as with all, the knife is habitually used in one hand and the fork in the other. The result never leads to an indiscriminate employment of either hand. The necessity for promptness of action in the constantly recurring operations of daily life is sufficient to superinduce the habitual employment of one or the other hand with no more conscious selection than in the choice of foot, when not under command of a drill sergeant. Indeed, the experience of many readers, whose training as volunteers has included that important branch of education styled “the goose step,” must have convinced them that few questions are more perplexing to the novice than, “Which is the right foot, and which is the left?” In football no player is in doubt as to the foot he shall use. In cricket there is no uncertainty as to the choice of hand for the bat. In digging the action is so certain, though unpremeditated, that in Ireland, and probably elsewhere, “the spade-foot” is a term in general use. It is not necessarily the right foot, but it is always the same. The unpremeditated action of hand or foot is uniform, as the reader will find by clasping his hands with the fingers interlaced, or inviting another to do so. It is no matter of chance which thumb shall be uppermost. But combined operations involving close unity of action are rare in savage life; and man in the hunter stage is little affected in his habits by social usage. Hence spontaneous left-handedness may be looked for more frequently in such a stage, and even in peasant life, than in cultured society; though the occasions for its manifestation are more rare.

Attention has already been directed to the test of the diverse direction in which a profile is most readily, and therefore most naturally, drawn if executed by the right or the left hand. In so far as the drawings or etchings of the palæolithic age are available for the application of this test, the following data may be adduced:—

The mammoth drawing from La Madelaine Cave; the bison, imperfect, showing only the hind-quarters; and the ibex, on reindeer-antler, from Laugerie Basse; the group of reindeers from the Dordogne, two walking and one lying on its back; the cave-bear of the Pyrenees, from the cave of Massat, in the department of Ariége; and another sketch representing a hunter stalking the Urus: may all be regarded as right-hand drawings. But the horses from La Madelaine, engraved on reindeer-antler, specially noticeable for their large heads; the horse, from Creswell Crags; and, above all, the remarkably spirited drawing of the reindeer grazing, from Thayngen in the Kesserloch—a sketch, marked by incident, both in the action of the animal and its surroundings, suggestive of an actual study from nature,—all appear to be left-hand drawings.

The number of examples thus far adduced is obviously too small to admit of any general conclusions as to the relative use of the right or left hand being based on their evidence; but so far as it goes, while it presents one striking example of a left-handed drawing, it confirms the idea of the predominance of right-handedness at that remote stage in the history of European man. It confirms, moreover, the correctness of the distinction already made between the preferential use of either hand by the cultured and skilled workman, or the artist, and its employment among rude, unskilled labourers engaged in such toil as may be readily accomplished by either hand. That the use of the left hand is transmitted from parent to child, and so, like other peculiarities, is to some extent hereditary, is undoubted. This has, therefore, to be kept in view in drawing any comprehensive deductions from a few examples confined to two or three localities. It may be that the skilled draftsman of the Vézère, or the gifted artist to whom we owe the Kesserloch drawing, belonged to a family, or possibly a tribe, among whom left-handedness prevailed to an unusual extent; and so might be developed not only hereditarily but by imitation. But on the other hand, even among those palæolithic draftsmen, there is a distinct preference for the right hand in the majority of cases; and this is just what was to be expected. The more the subject is studied it becomes manifest that education, with the stimulus furnished by the necessities arising from all combined action, has much to do with a full development of right-handedness. The bias is unquestionably in that direction; but with many it is not so active as to be beyond the reach of education, such as the habit and usage of companions would supply, to overcome it. But with a considerable number the preferential use of the right hand is prompted by a strong, if not unconquerable instinctive impulse. A smaller number are no less strongly impelled to the use of the left hand. In the ruder conditions of society each man is free to follow the natural bias; and in the absence or rare occurrence of the need for combined action, either habit attracts little attention. But so soon as co-operation begins to exercise its restraining and constraining influences, a very slight bias, due probably to individual organic structure, will suffice to determine the preference for one hand over the other, and so to originate the prevalent law of dexterity. The results shown by the ancient drawings of Europe’s cave-men perfectly accord with this. In that remote dawn every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Some handled their tools and drew with the left hand; a larger number used the right hand; but as yet no rule prevailed. In this, as in certain other respects, the arts and habits of that period belong to a chapter in the infancy of the race, when the law of dexterity, as well as other laws begot by habit, convenience, or mere prescriptive conventionality, had not yet found their place in that unwritten code to which a prompter obedience is rendered than to the most absolute of royal or imperial decrees.

But we are not limited to the comparatively rare and exceptional examples of primitive dexterity which the works of the palæolithic carver and etcher supply for illustrations of the special habit now under consideration. The graceful proportions and delicate manipulation of many of the chipped implements of flint have, not unnaturally, excited both admiration and wonder, in view of the very limited resources of the worker in flint.

But the process of the ancient arrow-maker is no lost art. It has been found in use among many barbarous races; and is still practised by some of the American Indian tribes, to whom the art has doubtless been transmitted through successive generations from remotest times. The modes of manufacture vary somewhat among different tribes; but they have been repeatedly witnessed and described by explorers who have watched the native arrow-maker at work; and his operations no longer present the difficulties which were long supposed to beset this “lost art” of prehistoric times. Among the rarer primitive implements are hammer-stones, oblong or rounded in shape, generally with cavities worked in two faces, so as to admit of their being conveniently held between the finger and thumb. Implements of this class have been repeatedly recovered from the French caves. An interesting example occurred among the objects embedded in the red cave-earth of Kents’s Hole, Devonshire; and others of different periods, usually quartzite pebbles or nodules of flint, have been found in many localities. Some of them were probably used in breaking the larger bones to extract the marrow, but the battered edges of others show their contact with harder material. Similar hammer-stones occur in the Danish peat-mosses, in the Swiss lake-dwellings, in sepulchral deposits, and are also included among the implements of modern savage art. They vary also in size, and were, no doubt, applied to diverse purposes.

The mode of fashioning the large, tongue-shaped implements and rude stone hatchets, which are among the most characteristic drift implements, it can scarcely be doubted, was by blows of a stone or flint hammer; as was obviously the case with large unfinished flint or horn-stone implements recovered by me from some of the numerous pits of the Flint Ridge, a siliceous deposit of the Carboniferous Age which extends through the State of Ohio, from Newark to New Lexington. At various points along the ridge funnel-shaped pits occur, varying from four or five to fifteen feet deep; and similar traces of ancient mining may be seen in other localities, as at Leavenworth, about three hundred miles below Cincinnati, where the gray flint or chert abounds, of which large implements are chiefly made. The sloping sides of the pits are in many cases covered with the fractured flints, some of them partially shaped as if for manufacture. The work in the quarry was, no doubt, the mere rough fashioning of the flint by the tool-makers, with a view to facility of transport, in many cases, to distant localities. But the finer manipulation, by means of which the carefully-finished arrow-heads, knives, lances, hoes, drills, scrapers, etc., were manufactured, was reserved for leisurely and patient skill. Longfellow, in his Indian epic, represents the Dacotah arrow-maker busy plying his craft. It was no doubt pursued by specially skilled workmen; for considerable dexterity is needed in striking the flakes from the flint core, and fashioning them into the nicely-finished edged tools and weapons to be seen in many museums. The choice of material is by no means limited to flint.

Beautifully-finished arrow-heads and other smaller implements, fashioned of jasper, chalcedony, white quartz, and rock-crystal, are among the prized relics of many collections. The diversity of fracture in such materials must have taxed the skill of the expert workman, familiar chiefly with the regular cleavage of the obsidian, chert, or flint. But it is now known that the more delicate operations in the finishing of the flint implements were done by means of pressure with a horn or bone arrow-flaker; and not by a succession of blows with a chisel or hammer. The process has been repeatedly described by eye-witnesses. Dr. Evans quotes more than one account of methods pursued among the Eskimo, the native Mexicans, and the Shasta Indians of California. Another, and in some respects more minute account of the process, as it is in use by the Wintoon Indians, is furnished by Mr. B. B. Redding, in the American Naturalist, from his own personal observation. The material, as among the Shasta Indians, was obsidian; but the process is equally applicable to flint, the cleavage of which is nearly similar.

The artificer was Consolulu, the aged chief of the Wintoon Indians. His implements consisted of a deer-horn prong split lengthwise, four inches long and half an inch thick, with the semicircular end at right angles; two deer-horn prongs, one smaller than the other, with the ends ground down nearly to the shape of a square sharp-pointed file; and a piece of well-tanned buckskin, thick, soft, and pliable. Laying, as we are told, a lump of obsidian, about a pound in weight, in the palm of the left hand, he placed between the first and second fingers of the same hand the semi-cylindrical deer-horn implement, so that the straight side of one of the ends rested about a quarter of an inch from the edge of the block of obsidian. With a small water-worn stone in his right hand, he struck the other end of the prong, and a flake of obsidian was severed, well adapted for the arrow-head. On the buckskin, in the palm of his left hand, he laid the obsidian flake, which he held in place by the first three fingers of that hand, and then took such a position on the ground that the left elbow could rest on the left knee and obtain a firm support. Holding in his right hand the larger of the two pointed prongs, and resting his thumb on the side of his left hand to serve as a fulcrum, he brought the point of the prong about one-eighth of an inch within the edge of the flake; and then, exerting a firm downward pressure, fragment after fragment was broken off until the edge of the arrow was made straight. As all the chips came off the lower edge, the cutting edge was not yet in the centre of the side. But the Wintoon arrow-maker rubbed the side of the prong repeatedly over the sharp edge, turned over the flake, and, resuming the chipping as before, brought the cutting edge to the centre. In a similar manner, the other side and the concave base of the arrow-head were finished. The formation of indentations in the sides near the base for the retention of the tendons to bind the arrow-head securely to the shaft, apparently the most difficult process, was in reality the easiest. The point of the arrow-head was held between the thumb and finger of the left hand, while the base rested on the buckskin cushion in the palm. The point of the smaller deer-horn prong, not exceeding one-sixteenth of an inch square, was brought to bear on the part of the side where the Indian arrow-maker considered the notch should be. A sawing motion made the chips fly to right and left, and in less than a minute it was cut to the necessary depth. The other side was then completed in like manner. The entire process was accomplished, and the arrow-head finished, in about forty minutes.

This account of the process of the Wintoon arrow-maker refers, it will be seen, with a marked though probably undesigned emphasis, to the use of the right hand in all his active manipulations. Its minute details are in other respects full of interest from the light we may assume them to throw on the method pursued by the primitive implement makers of the earliest Stone Age. Dr. Evans describes and figures a class of flint tools recovered from time to time, the edges of which, blunted and worn at both ends, suggest to his experienced eye their probable use for chipping out arrow-heads and other small implements of flint, somewhat in the fashion detailed above, with the tool of deer’s horn. To those accordingly he applies the name of flaking tools, or fabricators. But whether fashioned by means of flint or horn fabricator, it is to be noted that the material to be operated upon has to be held in one hand, while the tool is dexterously manipulated with the other. Signor Craveri, whose long residence in Mexico gave him very favourable opportunities for observing the process of the native workers in obsidian, remarks that, when the Indians “wish to make an arrow or other instrument of a splinter of obsidian, they take the piece in the left hand, and hold grasped in the other a small goat’s horn. They set this piece of obsidian upon the horn, and dexterously pressing it against the point of it, while they give the horn a gentle movement from right to left, and up and down, they disengage from it frequent chips; and in this way obtain the desired form.”[1] Again, in an account communicated to Sir Charles Lyell by Mr. Cabot, of the mode of procedure of the Shasta Indian arrow-makers, after describing the detachment of a piece from the obsidian pebble with the help of an agate chisel, he thus proceeds: “Holding the piece against the anvil with thumb and finger of his left hand, he commenced a series of blows, every one of which chipped off fragments of the brittle substance.” The patient artificer worked upwards of an hour before he succeeded in producing a perfect arrow-head. His ingenious skill excited the admiration of the spectator, who adds the statement that among the Indians of California arrow-making is a distinct profession, in which few attain excellence.

The point noticeable here in reference to the accounts given by the various observers is the uniform assumption of right-handedness. Mr. Redding, Signor Craveri, and Mr. Cabot not only agree in describing the block of obsidian as held in the left hand, while the tools are employed in the right hand to fashion it into shape; but the whole language, especially in the description given by Signor Craveri, assumes right-handedness as not only the normal, but the invariable characteristic of the worker in stone. In reality, however, an ingenious investigator, Mr. F. H. Cushing of the Smithsonian Institution, while engaged in a series of tentative experiments to determine the process of working in flint and obsidian, had his attention accidentally called to the fact that the primitive implements of the Stone Age perpetuate for us a record of the use of one or the other hand in their manufacture. With the instinctive zeal of youthful enthusiasm Mr. Cushing, while still a boy on his father’s farm in Western New York, carried out a systematic series of flint workings with a view to ascertain for himself the process by which the ancient arrow-makers fashioned the flint implements that then excited his interest. After repeated failures in his attempts to chip the flint into the desired shape by striking off fragments with a stone hammer, he accidentally discovered that small flakes could be detached from the flint core with great certainty and precision by pressure with a pointed rod of bone or horn; and, as I have recently learned from him, the instrument employed by him in those experiments was the same as that which Dr. John Evans informs me he accidentally hit upon in his earliest successful efforts at flint-arrow making, viz. a tooth-brush handle. In thus employing a bone or horn flaker, the sharp edge of the flake cuts slightly into the bone; and when the latter is twisted suddenly upward, a small scale flies off at the point of pressure in a direction which can be foreseen and controlled. With this discovery the essential process of arrow-making had been mastered. Spear and arrow-heads could be flaked with the most delicate precision, with no such liability to fracture as leads to constant failure in any attempt to chip even the larger and ruder spear or axe-heads into shape. The hammer-stone only suffices for the earlier processes, including the detachment of the flake from the rough flint nodule, and trimming it roughly into the required form, preparatory to the delicate manipulation of edging, pointing, and notching the arrow-head. The thinning of the flint-blade is effected by detaching long thin scales or flakes from the surface by using the flaker like a chisel and striking it a succession of blows with a hammer-stone. The marks of this delicate surface-flaking are abundantly manifest on the highly-finished Danish knives, daggers, and large spear-heads, as well as upon most other flint implements of Europe’s Neolithic Age. The large spear and tongue-shaped implements of the drift are, on the contrary, rudely chipped, evidently by the blows of a hammer-stone; although some of the more delicately fashioned drift implements seem to indicate that the use of the flint or bone flaker was not unknown to the men of the Palæolithic Age. But the chipping-stone or hammer was in constant use at the later period; and the small hammer-stone, with indentations on its sides for the finger and thumb, and its rounded edges marked with the evidence of long use in chipping the flint nodules into the desired forms, abounds both in Europe and America, wherever the arrow-maker has carried on his primitive art. The implements in use varied with the available material. A T-shaped wooden flaker sufficed for the Aztecs in shaping the easily-worked obsidian. The jasper, chalcedony, and quartz, in like manner, yield readily to the pressure of a slender flaker of horn; whereas Mr. Cushing notes that the “tough horn-stone of Western Arctic America could not be flaked by pressure in the hand, but must be rested against some solid substance, and flaked by means of an instrument, the handle of which fitted the palm like that of an umbrella, enabling the operator to exert a pressure against the substance to be chipped nearly equal to the weight of the body.” One result of Mr. Cushing’s experiments in arrow-making was to satisfy him that the greatest difficulty was to make long narrow surface-flakes. Hence, contrary to all preconceived ideas, it is easier to form the much-prized, delicately-finished small arrow-head, with barbs and stem, than larger and seemingly ruder implements which involve much surface-flaking.

It is interesting to learn of the recovery of this lost art of the ancient arrow-makers by a series of tentative experiments independently pursued by different observers. Before Mr. Cushing’s attention had been directed to any of the descriptions of the process of modern flint-workers, now familiar to us, he aimed at placing himself in the same condition as the primitive manufacturer of Europe’s Stone Age, or of the ancient Mound Builders of North America, devoid of metallic tools, and with the flint, obsidian, jasper, or hornstone, as the most available material out of which to fashion nearly all needful implements. He set to work accordingly with no other appliances than such sticks and variously shaped stones as could be found on the banks of the streams where he sought his materials. The results realise to us, in a highly interesting way, the earliest stages in the training of the self-taught workman of the Palæolithic Age. After making various implements akin to the most rudely fashioned examples from the river-drift or the old flint pits, by means of chipping one flint or stone with another, he satisfied himself that no amount of chipping, however carefully practised, would produce surfaces like the best of those which he was trying to imitate. He accordingly assumed that there must be some other process unknown to him. By chance he tried pressure with the point of a stick, instead of chipping with a stone, and the mystery was solved. He had hit on nearly the same method already described as in use by Aztecs, Eskimos, and Red Indians; and found that he could fashion the fractured flint or obsidian into nearly any shape that he desired. As has been already noted, Mr. Cushing, like Dr. Evans, resorted subsequently to the easily available tool furnished by the handle of a tooth-brush. Having thus mastered the secret of the old flint-workers, he succeeded before long in the manufacture of well-finished arrows, spear-heads, and daggers of flint, closely resembling the products of the primitive workmen both of the Old and the New World.

Thus far the results accord with other investigations; but in the course of his operations Mr. Cushing also noted this fact, that the grooves produced by the flaking of the flint or obsidian all turned in one direction. This proved to be due to the constant use of his right hand. When the direction of pressure by the bone or stick was reversed, the result was apparent in the opposite direction of the grooves. So far as his observations then extended, he occasionally found an arrow-head or other primitive stone implement with the flake grooves running from left to right, showing, as he believed, the manipulation of a left-handed workman; but, from the rarity of their occurrence, it might be concluded that, as a rule, prehistoric man was right-handed. When Mr. Cushing reported the results of those investigations into the arts of the Stone Age, at a meeting of the Anthropological Society of Washington in May 1879, Professor Mason confirmed from his own observation the occurrence of flint implements indicating by the reversed direction of the bevelling that they were produced by left-handed workmen. Mr. Cushing further notes that “arrow-making is accompanied by great fatigue and profuse perspiration. It has a prostrating effect upon the nervous system, which shows itself again in the direction of fracture. The first fruits of the workman’s labour, while still fresh and vigorous, can be distinguished from the implements produced after he had become exhausted at his task; and it is thus noteworthy that on an unimpressible substance like flint even the moods and passions of long-forgotten centuries may be found thus traced and recorded.”

In an ingenious brochure by Mr. Charles Reade, styled “The Coming Man,” specially aiming at the development in the rising generation of the use of the left hand, so that the man of the future shall be ambidextrous or “either-handed,” he remarks: “There certainly is amongst mankind a vast weight of opinion against my position that man is by nature as either-handed as an ape; and that custom should follow nature. The majority believe the left arm and hand inferior to the right in three things: power, dexterity, and dignity. Nor is this notion either old-fashioned or new-fangled. It is many thousand years old; and comes down by unbroken descent to the present day.” The writer then goes on to affirm: “It has never existed amongst rank barbarians; it is not indicated in the genuine flint instruments; but only in those which modern dexterity plants in old strata, to delight and defraud antiquarians; and the few primitive barbarians that now remain, living relics of the Stone Age, use both arms indifferently.” The conclusions here assumed as established by evidence derived from the study of “the genuine flint instruments” imply, I presume, that they do embody indications of right and left-hand manipulation in nearly equal proportions; whereas the forgeries of the modern “Flint Jack” all betray evidence of right-handed manufacture, and of consequent modernness. This, however, must have been set forth as a mere surmise; for, as now appears, it is in conflict with the results of careful investigations directed to the products of the primitive flint workers. The opinion adopted by Mr. Cushing, after repeated observation and tentative experiment, is that primitive man was, as a rule, right-handed. The evidence adduced is insufficient for an absolute determination of the question; but any strongly-marked examples of the left-handed workman’s art thus far observed among palæolithic flint implements appear to be exceptional. No higher authority than Dr. John Evans can be appealed to in reference to the manipulations of the primitive flint-worker, and, in writing to me on the subject, he remarks: “I think that there is some evidence of the flint-workers of old having been right-handed; the particular twist, both in some palæolithic implements, as in one in my own possession from Hoxne, and in some American rifled arrow-heads, being due to the manner of chipping, and being most in accordance with their being held in the left hand and chipped with the right.” In the detailed description, given in his Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain, of the example from Hoxne above referred to, Dr. John Evans remarks: “It presents the peculiarity, which is by no means uncommon in ovate implements, of having the side edges not in one plane, but forming a sort of ogee curve. In this instance the blade is twisted to such an extent that a line drawn through the two edges near the point is at an angle of at least 45° to a line through the edges at the broadest part of the implement. I think,” he adds, “that this twisting of the edges was not in this case intended to serve any particular purpose, but was rather the accidental result of the method pursued in chipping the flint into its present form.”[2] A similar curvature is seen in a long-pointed implement from Reculver, in the collection of Mr. J. Brent, F.S.A., and again in another large example of this class, from Hoxne in Suffolk, presented to the Society of Antiquaries of London upwards of eighty years ago. This, as Dr. Evans notes, exhibits the same peculiarity of the twisting of the edges so markedly, and indeed so closely resembles the specimen in his own collection, that they might have been made by the same hand. Of another example, from Santon Downham, near Hetford, Suffolk, almond-shaped, and with dendritic markings in evidence of its palæolithic date, Dr. Evans remarks: “It is fairly symmetrical in contour with an edge all round, which is somewhat blunted at the base. This edge, however, is not in one plane, but considerably curved, so that when seen sideways it forms an ogee curve;” and he adds: “I have other implements of the same, and of more pointed forms, with similarly curved edges, both from France and other parts of England, but whether this curvature was intentional it is impossible to say. In some cases it is so marked that it can hardly be the result of accident; and the curve is, so far as I have observed, almost without exception , and not . If not intentional, the form may be the result of all the blows by which the implement was finally chipped out having been given on the one face on one side, and on the opposite on the other.”[3] In other words, the implement-maker worked throughout with the flaker in the same hand; and that hand, with very rare exceptions, appears to have been the right hand. The evidence thus far adduced manifestly points to the predominance of right-handed men among the palæolithic flint-workers. For if the flint-arrow maker, working apart, and with no motive, therefore, suggested by the necessity of accommodating himself to a neighbouring workman, has habitually used the right hand from remote palæolithic times, it only remains to determine the origin of a practice too nearly invariable to have been the result of accident. This, however, has long eluded research; or thus far, at least, has been ascribed to very different causes. But to any who regards the special inquiry now under review as one worthy of further consideration, the class of implements referred to offers a trustworthy source of evidence whereby to arrive at a relative estimate of the prevalent use of one or the other hand among uncultured races of men, alike in ancient and modern times.

Dr. Evans has figured and described what he believes to have been the flaking tools or fabricators in earliest use among the flint-workers for chipping out arrow-heads and other small implements. They are fashioned of the same material; and some of them are carefully wrought into a form best adapted for being held in the hand of the workman. Specimens of the bone arrow-flakers in use by the Eskimo workers in flint are also familiar to us. Different forms of those instruments are engraved among the illustrations to The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain, from specimens in the Blackmore Museum and the Christy Collection;[4] and Dr. Evans describes the mode of using them as witnessed by Sir Edward Belcher among the Eskimo of Cape Lisburne, but without reference to the point now alluded to. Dr. John Rae, who, like myself, is inveterately left-handed, informs me that, without having taken particular notice of Indian or Eskimo practice in the use of one or the other hand, he observed that some among them were markedly ambidextrous. But, he adds, “from a curious story told me by an Eskimo about a bear throwing a large piece of ice at the head of a walrus, and telling me as a noteworthy fact that he threw it with the left forepaw, as if it were something unusual, it would seem to indicate that left-handedness was not very common among the Eskimos.” It shows, at any rate, that the Eskimo noted the use of the left paw as something diverse from the normal practice. But if the deductions based on the experimental working in flint are well founded, the test supplied by the direction of the flaking grooves of obsidian, chert, or flint implements will be equally available for determining the prevalent use of one or other hand by the Eskimo and other modern savage races, as among those of the Palæolithic and Neolithic Periods.