spiral of corkscrews and of ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with the natural twist of the right hand:  try to drive in an imaginary corkscrew with the right hand, the opposite way, and you will see how utterly awkward and clumsy is the motion.  The strap of the flap that covers the keyhole in trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to the right, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it be conveniently buckled by a right-handed person.  The hands of watches and the numbers of dial-faced barometers run from left to right:  this is a peculiarity dependent upon the left to right system of writing.  A servant offers you dishes from the left side:  you can’t so readily help yourself from the right, unless left-handed.  Schopenhauer despaired of the German race, because it could never be taught like the English to keep to the right side of the pavement in walking.  A sword is worn at the left hip:  a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at the side; in the left, if in the coat-tails:  in either case for the right hand to get at it most easily.  A watch-pocket is made in the left breast; a pocket for railway tickets half-way down the right side.  Try to reverse any one of these simple actions, and you will see at once that they are immediately implied in the very fact of our original right-handedness.

And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles Reade’s mistaken notion of the advantages of ambidexterity.  You couldn’t make both hands do everything alike without a considerable loss of time, effort, efficiency, and convenience.  Each hand learns to do its own work and to do it well; if you made it do the other hand’s into the bargain, it would have a great deal more to learn, and we should find it difficult even then to prevent specialisation.  We should have to make things deliberately different for the two hands—­to have rights and lefts in everything, as we have them now in boots and gloves—­or else one hand must inevitably gain the supremacy.  Sword-handles, shears, surgical instruments, and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed, while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are adapted to the left; in each case for a perfectly sufficient reason.  You can’t upset all this without causing confusion.  More than that, the division of labour thus brought about is certainly a gain to those who possess it:  for if it were not so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten the dextro-sinistrals in the struggle for existence; whereas we know that the exact opposite has been the case.  Man’s special use of the right hand is one of his points of superiority to the brutes.  If ever his right hand should forget its cunning, his supremacy would indeed begin to totter.  Depend upon it, Nature is wiser than even Charles Reade.  What she finds most useful in the long run must certainly have many good points to recommend it.