Ambidexterity Author:John Jackson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THEORIES OF ONE-HANDEDNESS One-handedness is so common all over the world, and has been so in every age and nation back to the remotest histori... more »c period, that the conclusion is forced upon us that there must be a very cogent reason for such a manifestation. Doubtless there have been all along the past centuries of civilization periodical waves of curiosity or inquiry as to the prevalence of one-handedness; for observant minds must have been struck with the anomalous state of things, and- the superior dexterity of their right hands. But in spite of the most careful study, we are almost as much in the dark regarding the true cause of dextrality, and of the much less frequent sinistrality, as were our forefathers thousands of years ago. Elaborate and plausible theories have been formulated to account for the one-handedness of man, but, as we shall see in the sequel, there is nothing hitherto advanced that can be accepted as the prime cause of it. Wonderful, as all will grant it is, that a two-handed creature should be one-handed in practice, it is still more wonderful that, go where we will, men are not merely One- handed, they are all of them R1GHT-handed ! If there had been as many left-handed persons as right-handed, or thereabouts, the problem would be a different one, and we might feel inclined to challenge the perfection of an economy that produced a two-handed order of beings who were unable to utilize the limbs with which theywere provided, finding that it was much better to possess one dexterous hand than two. But when it is further seen that practically every nation elects to use only one hand, and that they are all equally peculiar in selecting the same hand, namely, the Right, for the post of honour, the complexity increases, and we are forced to th...« less