I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with this one very
clear historical datum, because it is interesting to be able to say with
tolerable certainty that there really was a period in our life as a
species when man in the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he become
otherwise? This question is not only of importance in itself, as helping
to explain the origin and source of man's supremacy in nature--his
tool-using faculty--but it is also of interest from the light it casts
on that fallacy of poor Charles Reade's already alluded to--that we
ought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition of
savages. I think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised man
now right-handed, we shall also see why it would be highly undesirable
for him to return, after so many ages of practice, to the condition of
his undeveloped stone-age ancestors.

The very beginning of our modern right-handedness goes back, indeed, to
the most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be different
in use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spite
of all appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally,
indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn't show: but it shows
internally. We all of us know, in spite of Sganarelle's assertion to the
contrary, that the apex of the heart inclines to the left side, and that
the liver and other internal organs show a generous disregard for strict
and formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those human
organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get the clue to the
irregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even the
particular direction of the printed letters now before you.

For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His manners were
strikingly deficient in that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de