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THE HAND 1

THE EDUCATED HAND 12

THE WILLING HAND 23

PALAEOLITHIC DEXTERITY 31

THE DISHONOURED HAND 62

THE PRIMITIVE ABACUS 77

THE COMPASS POINTS 89

HANDWRITING 97

PSYCHO-PHYSICAL ACTION 119

CONFLICT OF THEORIES 149

HAND AND BRAIN 183

THE HAND

The hand is one of the most distinctive characteristics of man. Without its special organisation he would be for all practical purposes inferior to many other animals. It is the executive portion of the upper limb whereby the limits of his capacity as "the tool-user" are determined. As such, it is the active agent of the primary sense of touch, the organ of the will, the instrument which works harmoniously with brain and heart, and by means of which imagination and idealism are translated into fact. Without it man's intellectual superiority would be to a large extent abortive. In its combination of strength with delicacy, it is an index of character in all its variations in man and woman from childhood to old age. It is an exponent of the refinement of high civilisation, no less than the organ of all dexterity and force of the skilled inventor and mechanician. In the art of the true painter, as in works of Titian and Vandyke, the portraiture of the hand is no less replete with individuality than the face.

In so far as the hand is to be recognised as the organ of touch or feeling, it plays a different part from the other organs of the senses. It is no mere passive recipient of impressions, but selects the objects to be subjected to its discrimination, and communicates the results to the central organ: the seat of intelligence. As a responsive agent of the mind it is the productive artificer. In its independent estimate of form and texture it performs for all of us the function of sight in the darkness; and to the blind it is an eye wherewith they are enabled to receive correct impressions of external nature, and to read for themselves the lettered page. The hand, moreover, has an utterance of its own. The unpremeditated actions of the orator harmoniously emphasise his speech; and in strong emotional excitement, the movements of the hands are scarcely less expressive than the tongue. There are, indeed, occasions when its symbolic speech needs no audible accompaniment. The repelling action of the out-stretched palm, accompanied by the averted head, can dispense with words; and the hand in benediction has no need of them. The imagination realises the amplest significance of such gestures, as in the final parting of Arthur and Guinevere--

She in the darkness o'er her fallen head Perceived the waving of his hands that blest.

In discussing the specialty of right-handedness, either as an expansion or limitation of the use of the hand, it is not necessary to enlarge on the distinctive anatomical relations of the human hand to the fore-limb of other animals; for if the final results here set forth are correct, the preferential and instinctive employment of one limb and extremity is not an exclusive attribute of man. Nevertheless the hand is one of the most characteristic human features. The practical distinction between man and any approximate living creature lies in the fact that the most highly developed anthropoid, while in a sense four-handed, has no such delicate instrument of manipulation as that which distinguishes man from all other animals. In most monkeys there is a separate and movable thumb in all the four limbs. The characteristic whereby their hallux, or great toe, instead of being parallel with the others, and so adapted for standing and walking erect, has the power of action of a thumb, gives the prehensile character of a hand to the hind-limb. This is not confined to the arboreal apes. It is found in the baboons and others that are mainly terrestrial in their habits, and employ the four limbs ordinarily in moving on the ground.

There are unquestionably traces of prehensile capacity in the human foot; and even of remarkable adaptability to certain functions of the hand. Well-known cases have occurred of persons born without hands, or early deprived of them, learning to use their feet in many delicate operations, including not only the employment of pen and pencil, but the use of scissors, with a facility which demonstrates the latent capacity for separate action of the great toe, and its thumblike apposition to the others. In 1882 I witnessed, in the Museum at Antwerp, an artist without arms skilfully use his brushes with his right foot. He employed it with great ease, arranging his materials, opening his box of colours, selecting and compressing his tubes, and "handling" his brush, seemingly with a dexterity fully equal to that of his more favoured rivals. At an earlier date, during a visit to Boston, I had an opportunity of observing a woman, under similar disadvantages, execute elaborate pieces of scissor-work, and write not only with neatness, but with great rapidity. Nevertheless the human foot, in its perfect natural development, is not a hand. The small size of the toes as compared with the fingers, and the position and movements of the great toe, alike point to diverse functions and a greatly more limited range of action. But the capacity of the system of muscles of the foot--scarcely less elaborate than that of the hand,--is obscured to us by the rigid restraints of the modern shoe. The power of voluntary action in the toes manifests itself not only in cases where early mutilation, or malformation at birth, compels the substitution of the foot for the hand; but among savages, where the unshackled foot is in constant use in climbing and feeling its way through brake and jungle, the free use of the toes, and the power of separating the great toe from the others, are retained in the same way as may be seen in the involuntary movements of a healthy child. When camping out in long vacation holidays in the Canadian wilds, repeated experience has proved to me that the substitution for a few weeks of the soft, yielding deerskin moccasin of the Indian, in place of the rigid shoe, restores even to the unpractised foot of civilised man a freedom of action in the toes, a discriminating sense of touch, and a capacity for grasping rock or tree in walking or climbing, of which he has had no previous conception. The Australian picks up his spear with the naked foot; and the moccasin of the American Indian scarcely diminishes the like capacity to take hold of stick or stone. The Hindu tailor, in like manner, sits on the ground holding the cloth tightly stretched with his toes, while both hands are engaged in the work of the needle.

Such facts justify the biologist in regarding this element of structural difference between man and the apes as inadequate for the determination of a specific zoological classification. Nevertheless man still stands apart as the tool-maker, the tool-user, the manipulator. A comparison between the fore and hind limbs of the Chimpanzee, or other ape, leaves the observer in doubt whether to name them alike as hands or feet, both being locomotive as well as prehensile organs; whereas the difference between the hand and foot of man is obvious, and points to essentially diverse functions. The short, weak thumb, the long, nearly uniform fingers, and the inferior play of the wrist in the monkey, are in no degree to be regarded as defects. They are advantageous to the tree-climber, and pertain to its hand as an organ of locomotion; whereas the absence of such qualities in the human hand secures its permanent delicacy of touch, and its general adaptation for many manipulative purposes.

The hand of man is thus eminently adapted to be the instrument for translating the conceptions of intelligent volition into concrete results. Dr. George Wilson in his fine prose poem: "The Five Gateways of Knowledge," speaks of it as giving expression "to the genius and the wit, the courage and the affection, the will and the power of man.... The term handicraftsman or hand-worker belongs to all honest, earnest men and women, and is a title which each should covet. For the Queen's hand there is the sceptre, and for the soldier's hand the sword; for the carpenter's hand the saw, and for the smith's hand the hammer; for the farmer's hand the plough, for the miner's hand the spade, for the sailor's hand the oar, for the painter's hand the brush, for the sculptor's hand the chisel, for the poet's hand the pen, and for the woman's hand the needle. If none of these, or the like, will fit us, the felon's chain should be round our wrist, and our hand on the prisoner's crank. But for each willing man and woman there is a tool they may learn to handle; for all there is the command: 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.'"

Other animals have their implements for constructive skill, and their weapons, offensive and defensive, as parts of their organic being; and are armed, equipped, clad, and mailed by no effort of their own. But man, inferior to all in offensive and defensive appliances, is a match for his most formidable assailants by means of appliances furnished by his dexterous hand in obedience to the promptings of intelligent volition.

The matured capacity of the hand is the necessary concomitant of man's intellectual development; not only enabling him to fashion all needful tools, and to place at a disadvantage the fiercest of his assailants armed by nature with formidable weapons of assault; but also to respond no less effectually to every prompting of the aesthetic faculty in the most delicate artistic creations. The very arts of the ingenious nest-makers, the instinctive weavers or builders, the spider, the bee, the ant, or the beaver, place them in striking contrast to man in relation to his handiwork. He alone, in the strict sense of the term, is a manufacturer. The Quadrumana, though next to man in the approximation of their fore-limbs to hands, claim no place among the instinctive architects, weavers, or spinners. The human hand, as an instrument of constructive design or artistic skill, ranks wholly apart from all the organs employed in the production of analogous work among the lower animals. The hand of the ape accomplishes nothing akin to the masonry of the swallow, or the damming and building of the beaver. But, imperfect though it seems, it suffices for all requirements of the forest-dweller. In climbing trees, in gathering and shelling nuts or pods, opening shell-fish, tearing off the rind of fruit, or pulling up roots; in picking out thorns or burs from its own fur, or in the favourite occupation of hunting for each other's parasites: the monkey uses the finger and thumb; and in many other operations performs with the hand what is executed by the quadruped or bird less effectually by means of the mouth or bill. At first sight we might be tempted to assume that the quadrumanous mammal had the advantage of us, as there are certainly many occasions when an extra hand could be turned to useful account. But not only do man's two hands prove greatly more serviceable for all higher purposes of manipulation than the four hands of the ape: a further specialty distinguishing him as he rises in the scale of intellectual superiority is that he seems to widen still more the divergence from the quadrumanous anthropoid by converting one hand into the favoured organ and servant of his will, while the other is relegated to a wholly subordinate place as its mere help and supplement.

THE EDUCATED HAND

This idea of the left hand being preoccupied with the shield, and so leaving to the other the active functions of the sword and spear hand, is familiar to the classical student, and will fitly come under review at a later stage. Nor can such secondary influences be overlooked. Whatever may prove to be the primary source of right-handedness, it cannot be doubted that, when thoroughly developed and systematically recognised as determining the character of many combined operations, the tendency would inevitably be to foster the preferential use of the right hand even in indifferent actions. Two causes have thus to be recognised as operating in the development of right-handedness, and begetting certain differences in its manifestation under varying social influences. There is a progressive scale, from the imperfect to the more perfectly developed, and then to the perfectly educated hand: all steps in its adaptation to the higher purposes of the manipulator. The hand of the rude savage, of the sailor, the miner, or blacksmith, while well fitted for the work to which it is applied, is a very different instrument from that of the chaser, engraver, or cameo-cutter; of the musician, painter, or sculptor. This difference is unquestionably a result of development, whatever the other may be; for, as we have in the ascending scale the civilised and educated man, so also we have the educated hand as one of the most characteristic features of civilisation. But here attention is at once called to the distinctive preference of the right hand, whether as the natural use of this more perfect organ of manipulation, or as an acquired result of civilisation. The phenomenon to be explained is not merely why each individual uses one hand rather than another. Experience abundantly accounts for this. But if it can be shown that all nations, civilised and savage, appear to have used the same hand, it is vain to look for the origin of this as an acquired habit. Only by referring it to some anatomical cause can its general prevalence, among all races and in every age, be satisfactorily accounted for. Nevertheless this simple phenomenon, cognisant to the experience of all, and brought under constant notice in our daily intercourse with others, long baffled the physiologist in his search for a satisfactory explanation.

The sense of touch--"The Feel-Gate" of Bunyan's famous Town of Mansoul,--is not limited, like the other senses, to one special organ, but pervades the entire body; and in its acute susceptibility to every irritant contact, communicates instantaneously with the vital cerebral centre of the whole nervous system by means of the electric chords or nerves. So effectual is this that "if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it." Nevertheless the hand is correctly recognised as the active organ of feeling; and by the delicately sensitive and well-trained fingers impressions are promptly conveyed to the brain and to the mind, relative to the qualities of all bodies within reach of the unfailing test of touch. In hearing and seeing the dual organs are in constant co-operation, and the injury of either involves a loss of power. But though we have two hands sensitive to all external impressions, only one of them is habitually recognised as the active agent of the brain; and except in a comparatively small number of cases, this is the hand on the right side of the body. It is surprising that this phenomenon so universally recognised as what may be styled an instinctive attribute of man, should not long since have been traced to its true source. Yet, as will be seen, some among the ablest anatomists have been content to refer it to mere habit, stereotyped by long usage and the exigencies of combined action into a general practice; while others have referred it to the disposition of the viscera, and the place of the heart on the left side.

In the sculptured hieroglyphics of Central America, and in the Mexican picture-writings, the human and other profiles are introduced in the large majority of examples looking to the left, as would be the natural result of the tracings of a right-handed draftsman. But the hand is also employed symbolically; while, among the civilised Peruvians, the impress of the naked hand was practised in the same way as by the Indians of the northern continent. Among an interesting collection of mummies recovered by Mr. J. H. Blake of Boston from ancient Peruvian cemeteries on the Bay of Chacota, one is the body of a female wrapped in parti-coloured garments of fine texture, and marked on the outer woollen wrappings with the impress of a human hand. The same impress of the red hand is common on Peruvian mummies.

THE WILLING HAND

The human hand is not only the symbol of the intelligent artificer, "the hand of the master," the sign and epitome of the lord and ruler; it is the instrument of the will alike for good and evil deeds. The idea of it as the active participator in every act embodies itself in all vocabularies. The imperial mandate, the lordly manumission, the skilled manufacturer, the handy tool, the unhandy workman, the left-handed stroke, the handless drudge, with other equally familiar terms, all refer to the same ever-ready exponent of the will; so that we scarcely recognise the term as metaphorical when we speak of the "willing hand." The Divine appeal to the wrathful prophet of Nineveh is based on the claim for mercy on behalf of those who had not yet attained to the first stage of dexterity which pertains to childhood. "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand that cannot discern between their right hand and their left?" To this same test of discernment poor Cassio appeals when, betrayed by the malignant craft of Iago, he would fain persuade himself he is not enslaved by the intoxicating draught: "Do not think, gentlemen, I am drunk. This is my right hand, and this is my left!" Only the infant or the drunkard, it is thus assumed, can fail to mark the distinction; and to select the true hand for all honourable service. It is the sceptred hand; the hand to be offered in pledge of amity; the one true wedding hand; the hand of benediction, ordination, consecration; the organ through which human will acts, whether by choice or by organic law. The attempt, therefore, to claim any independent rights or honourable status for the sinister hand seems an act of disloyalty, if not of sacrilege.

But hand and will have co-operated from the beginning in good and in evil; even as in that first erring deed, when Eve--

Her rash hand, in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck'd, she ate; Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe.

The symbolic and responsible hand accordingly figures everywhere. The drama of history and of fiction are alike full of it. Pilate vainly washes his hands as he asserts his innocence of the blood of the Just One. "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!" is the agonised cry of Lady Macbeth. "This unworthy hand!" exclaims the martyr, Cranmer, as he makes it expiate the unfaithful act of signature, as though it were an independent actor, alone responsible for the deed. In touching tenderness the venerable poet Longfellow thus symbolised the entrance on life's experiences--

Oh, little hands that, weak or strong, Have still to rule or serve so long; Have still so much to give or ask; I, who so long with tongue and pen Have toiled among my fellow-men, Am weary thinking of your task.

But childhood speedily reaches the stage when the privileged hand asserts its prerogative, and assumes its distinctive responsibility. For good or evil, not only does the right hand take precedence in the established formulae of speech, but the left hand is in many languages the symbol or equivalent of impurity, degradation, malice, and of evil doings.

Looking then on right-handedness as a very noticeable human attribute, and one that enters largely into the daily acts, the exceptional manifestations of skill, and many habits and usages of life: the fact is indisputable that, whether we ascribe its prevalence solely to education, or assign its origin to some organic difference, the delicacy of the sense of touch, and the manipulative skill and mobility of the right hand, in the majority of cases, so far exceeds that of the left that a term borrowed from the former expresses the general idea of dexterity. That education has largely extended the preferential use of the right hand is undoubted. That it has even unduly tended to displace the left hand from the exercise of its manipulative function, I fully believe. But so far as appears, in the preference of one hand for the execution of many special operations, the choice seems, by general consent, without any concerted action, to have been that of the right.

It is unnecessary here to aim at even an approximate estimate of the remoteness of that strange epoch when the cave-dwellers of the V?z?re and the northern slopes of the Pyrenees were the contemporaries of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the long-extinct carnivora of the caves; and the fossil horse, with the musk-sheep, reindeer, and other Arctic fauna, were objects of the chase among the hunters of the Garonne.

But the same period is no less definitely illustrated by deposits sealed up through unnumbered centuries under the stalagmitic flooring of limestone caves, or in the deposits of river gravels and silt, filling in many of the caves with red earth and gravel embedding implements closely resembling those of the drift. The ossiferous deposits, moreover, found in some of the oldest caves of England, France, and Belgium, which have disclosed palaeolithic tools, include also remains of the mammoth, cave-bear, fossil-horse, hyaena, reindeer, and other animals either wholly extinct, or such as prove by their character the enormous climatic changes referred to. In so far, therefore, as they afford any indication of the antiquity of man, they point to ages so remote that it is unnecessary to investigate the bearings of evidence suggestive of comparative degrees in time. Every new discovery does, indeed, add to our means of determining a relative prehistoric chronology which for some aspects of the inquiry is replete with interest and value. But the subject is referred to now solely in its bearing on the subordinate yet significant question relative to the manipulation of the primitive tool-maker.

PALAEOLITHIC DEXTERITY

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.

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 palaeolithic 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 Ari?ge; 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 V?z?re, 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 palaeolithic 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 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.

At the doorway of his wigwam Sat the ancient Arrow-maker, In the land of the Dacotahs, Making arrow-heads of jasper, Arrow-heads of chalcedony.

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." 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 Palaeolithic 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.

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."

THE DISHONOURED HAND

An interesting discovery made in recent years in the course of some researches into the traces of the neolithic flint-workers of Norfolk invites attention from the evidence it has been thought to furnish of the traces of a left-handed workman of that remote era.

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