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 formulæ 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. The proofs of the antiquity of this consensus present themselves in ever-increasing amplitude, leading finally to an investigation of traces apparently showing a prevalent _dexterity_ among palæolithic artificers. The paintings and intaglios of ancient Egypt, the sculptures of Nineveh and Babylon, and the later products of Hellenic and Etruscan art, when carefully studied, all yield illustrations of the subject. But the disclosures of archæology in its later co-operation with the researches of the geologist have familiarised us with phases of human history that relegate the builders of the Birs Nimrud, and the sculptors of Nineveh or Thebes, to modern centuries. The handiwork of the palæolithic cave-dwellers and the primitive drift-folk produce to us works of industry and skill, fashioned when art was in its infancy, and metallurgy unknown. It is unnecessary here to aim at even an approximate estimate of the remoteness of that strange epoch when the cave-dwellers of the Vézère 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.