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left in civilised life takes its beginning. At first, no doubt, the
superiority of the right hand was only felt in the matter of fighting.
But that alone gave it a distinct pull, and paved the way, at last, for
its supremacy elsewhere. For when weapons came into use, the habitual
employment of the right hand to grasp the spear, sword, or knife made
the nerves and muscles of the right side far more obedient to the
control of the will than those of the left. The dexterity thus acquired
by the right--see how the very word 'dexterity' implies this fact--made
it more natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the same
hand preferentially in the manufacture of flint hatchets, bows and
arrows, and in all the other manifold activities of savage life. It was
the hand with which he grasped his weapon; it was therefore the hand
with which he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right hand
remains especially 'the hand in which you hold your knife;' and that is
exactly how our own children to this day decide the question which is
which, when they begin to know their right hand from their left for
practical purposes.

A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter innumerable
other differences which naturally flow from it. Some of them are
extremely remote and derivative. Take, for example, the case of writing
and printing. Why do these run from left to right? At first sight such a
practice seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticed
above--the tendency to draw from right to left, in accordance with the
natural sweep of the hand and arm. And, indeed, it is a fact that all
early writing habitually took the opposite direction from that which is
now universal in western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance
(or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay standard),
that Hebrew is written from right to left, and that each book begins at
the wrong cover. The reason is that words, and letters, and
hieroglyphics were originally carved, scratched, or incised, instead of
being written with coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to follow
its natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in naive drawing, with a
free curve from the right leftward.

Nevertheless, the very same fact--that we use the right hand alone in
writing--made the letters run the opposite way in the end; and the
change was due to the use of ink and other pigments for staining
papyrus, parchment, or paper. I