2. Right and Left

Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar scriptural phrase,
'knoweth the right hand from the left.' This fact in his economy goes
closely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal on
this sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate
language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.
His right-handedness, in short, is part cause and part effect of his
universal supremacy in animated nature. He is what he is, to a great
extent, 'by his own right hand;' and his own right hand, we may shrewdly
suspect, would never have differed at all from his left were it not for
the manifold arts and trades and activities he practises.

It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage ran. Man was
once, in his childhood on earth, what Charles Reade wanted him again to
be in his maturer centuries, ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers of
this volume--in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoter
portions of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton and the
familiar knowledge of the Latin language have not yet penetrated--should
complain that I speak with unknown tongues, I will further explain for
their special benefit that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using the
right and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang remarks
in immortal verse, 'was the manner of Primitive Man.' He never minded
twopence which hand he used, as long as he got the fruit or the scalp he
wanted. How could he when twopence wasn't yet invented? His mamma never
said to him in early youth, 'Why-why,' or 'Tomtom,' as the case might
be, 'that's the wrong hand to hold your flint-scraper in.' He grew up to
man's estate in happy ignorance of such minute and invidious
distinctions between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that his
hands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into shapely
arrows; and he never even thought in his innocent soul which particular
hand he did it with.

How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about a gentleman whom
I never personally saw, and whose habits the intervention of five
hundred centuries has precluded me from studying at close quarters? At
first sight, you would suppose the evidence on such a point must be
purely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely be inventing
_à priori_ facts, evolved, _more Germanico_, from his inner
consciousness. Not so. See how clever modern archæology has become! I
base my assertion upon solid evidence. I know that Primitive Man was
ambidextrous, because he wrote and painted just as often with his left
as with his right, and just as successfully.

This seems once more a hazardous statement to make about a remote
ancestor, in the age