Right and Left by Grant Allen — Read

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.'