In reference to the question of hereditary transmission, the evidence, as in the case of Dr. Rae, is undoubted. Dr. R. A. Reeve, in whom also the original left-handedness has given place to a nearly equal facility with both hands, informs me that his father was left-handed. Again Dr. Pye-Smith quotes from the _Lancet_ of October 1870 the case of Mr. R. A. Lithgow, who writes to say that he himself, his father, and his grandfather have all been left-handed. This accords with the statement of M. Ribot in his _Heredity_. “There are,” he says, “families in which the special use of the left hand is hereditary. Girou mentions a family in which the father, the children, and most of the grand-children were left-handed. One of the latter betrayed its left-handedness from earliest infancy, nor could it be broken off the habit, though the left hand was bound and swathed.” Such persistent left-handedness is not, indeed, rare. In an instance communicated to me, both of the parents of a gentleman in Shropshire were left-handed. His mother, accordingly, watched his early manifestations of the same tendency, and employed every available means to counteract it. His left hand was bound up or tied behind him; and this was persevered in until it was feared that the left arm had been permanently injured. Yet all proved vain. The boy resumed the use of the left hand as soon as the restraint was removed; and though learning like others to use his right hand with facility in the use of the pen, and in other cases in which custom enforces compliance with the practice of the majority, he remained inveterately left-handed. Again a Canadian friend, whose sister-in-law is left-handed, thus writes to me: “I never heard of any of the rest of the family who were so; but one of her brothers had much more than the usual facility in using both hands, and in paddling, chopping, etc., used to shift about the implement from one hand to the other in a way which I envied. As to my sister-in-law, she had great advantages from her left-handedness. She was a very good performer on the piano, and her bass was magnificent. If there was a part to be taken only with one hand, she used to take the left as often as the right. But it was at needlework that I watched her with the greatest interest. If she was cutting out, she used to shift the scissors from one hand to the other; and would have employed the left hand more, were it not that all scissors, as she complained, are made right-handed, and she wished, if possible, to procure a left-handed pair. So also with the needle, she used the right hand generally; but in many delicate little operations her habit was to shift it to the left hand.”