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.' He grew up to
man's estate in happy ignorance of such minute and invidious
distinctions between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that his
hands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into shapely
arrows; and he never even thought in his innocent soul which particular
hand he did it with.

How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about a gentleman whom
I never personally saw, and whose habits the intervention of five
hundred centuries has precluded me from studying at close quarters? At
first sight, you would suppose the evidence on such a point must be
purely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely be inventing
_a priori_ facts, evolved, _more Germanico_, from his inner
consciousness. Not so. See how clever modern archaeology has become! I
base my assertion upon solid evidence. I know that Primitive Man was
ambidextrous, because he wrote and painted just as often with his left
as with his right, and just as successfully.

This seems once more a hazardous statement to make about a remote
ancestor, in the age before the great glacial epoch had furrowed the
mountains of Northern Europe; but, nevertheless, it is strictly true and
strictly demonstrable. Just try, as you read, to draw with the
forefinger and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile on
the page on which these words are printed. Do you observe that (unless
you are an artist, and therefore sophisticated) you naturally and
instinctively draw it with the face turned towards your left shoulder?
Try now to draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find it
requires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. The hand moves
of its own accord from without inward, not from within outward. Then,
again, draw with your left thumb and f