Right-Handedness.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIC, Issue 13330, 6 July 1907, Page 1 (Supplement)

Right-Handedness.

At the* Royal Institution,- London, on Mav 3. Sir James Crichton Browne lectured on "Bests rity and the Bend Sinister."' Ke said that during the last 2,0C0 years there had been innumerable eruptions of ambidextral enthusiasm, and some live years ago a new crusade on behalf of ambidexterity had "been started. Ke held, however that on the large scale ambidexterity was impossible and undesirable, that it was by the superior skill of his right hand that man had gotten" himself the victory, and that to try to undo his dextral pre-eminence was simply to fly in the face' of evolution. Righthandedness was a verv old story: it was plainly discernible in the art of Greece, Assyria, and Egypt, glimpses of it could be found among our ancestors in the Bronze Age and in Palaeolithic times, and some observers had detected fomhadowings of it even among the lower animals. All nations., tribes, and races, civilized and savage, had in all times preferentially -used not only one, bat tire same hand, and it was impossible to point to any civilised race manifesting any degree of either-hand-edness; the statement that the Japanese -were by law and.practice ambidextrous, he could say, on the authority of Baron Komura, was without foundation. It was doubtful, indeed, whether, strictly speaking, complete ambidexterity existed in any foß.y-developes 4 and civilised human bsings, though sometimes very close approximations to it occurred; bnt among microcephalic idiots, in whom the emall-headednecs was due to arrested,development, left-hand-edness and ambidexterity and been found to reach a proportion as high as 50 per cent. The source of right-handedness was much deeper than voluntary selection, and must be sought in anatomical configuration —in the structure and organisation of the brain that initiated, directed, and controlled all voluntary movements. The brain had two hemispheres, of which the right presided over the left side, of the body, and the left over the right side, and it was clear that functional differences- in the two hands were in some way connected -with differences in the two hemispheres—differences not of weight or blood supply, as had been suggested by some inquirers, but of convolutional development. Study of the speech centre in the third frontal or Bro'ca 6 convolution had thrown a flood of light on the subject of-.right-handedness, for it had shown that damage to this convolution- in the kit hemisphere deprived the right-han-ded man of speech, but left- the left-handad man writh speech while in th.-left-handed man the contrary held good. Here, then, there was one-sidedness of the brain, assuredly not due to use and wont, or to any acquired habit or-mechanical advantage. But the hand and arm centres in the brain were intimately linked -with the speech centres, and therefore it was only logical to infer that the preferential use of the right arm and hand in voluntary movements was also due to the leading part taken by the left hemisphere. We could not, he believed, get rid of our right-hand-edness, try how we might. It was woven in the brain; to change the pattern the tissues must be unravelled. Ambidextral culture, useful enough in re-spect of some few special movementfi in some few specially employed persons, must- on the large scale tend to confusion; and pushed towards that consummation" which its ardent apostles said.was so devoutly to be wished for, when the two hands would be able to write on two different subjects at the same time, it must involve the enormous enlargement of our already overgrown lunatic asvlums.