Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/108

 96 G. STANLEY HALL AND E. M. HARTWELL. In the general conformation of the surface of the body and of its internal parts, observation and anthropometry detect quite uniform, though usually slight, differences. Few noses are straight, but one enumerator found most to turn to the right, another to the left. Few cheeks are equally full ; few can pro- trude the tongue, gape, smile, corrugate the forehead, wink, make faces generally quite evenly, while in monomania, and even great fatigue, unequal imiervation of the two sides of the face is common. The teeth have been said to develop soonest, to be strongest, sometimes larger and more numerous, and to decay latest on the right side. Hair and beard are more abundant, nails are thicker, and sometimes have a " lick," or grow strongly towards the right ; and both hair and beard have been said, though with quite insufficient observation, to grow fastest on the right side. Greyness is very often asymmetrical. Asymmetry of the skull and its sutures is almost universal. In about two hundred impressions from different conformators, which we have carefully measured, we have found most symmetry in the occipital, with prominence to the left in the frontal, and still more in the temporal, regions. The right abdomen is more prominent. In right-handed people the left testicle is usually largest and most dependent ; and the right in left-handed people. The right breast has been observed to have the best and richest milk, and to be preferred by infants ; and the right parotid to secrete the most saliva. The position of the internal organs is nearly medial in the human embryo till the second month, when the apex of the heart is crowded to the left by the liver. From accidents of position, temperature, pressure, &c., during this period, the viscera are sometimes, though rarely, entirely transposed. This does not, however, insure congenital .left-handedness, as Hyrtl inferred, from callosities, &c., to be the case with the two subjects of his first record. Complete transposition is too rare for confident con- clusions, but must tend strongly to left-handedness, as the normal position of organs must tend to dextral pre-eminence. In nor- mal states of rest, though the blood is no purer or hotter on one side than on the other, as Aristotle asserted, it is probably con- veyed more directly and with more force through the slightly larger left carotid artery. The right hand is likely to be warmest, and the right side to sweat easiest. In violent exer- cise in the sun, Blake found the left side about one degree hotter in axilla, but no difference in a state of rest. Mosso's volumetric measurements indicated that in hypnotic catalepsy there was slightly more blood in the left arm, while the radial pulse of the right arm is strongest in fainting, and in dying can be felt after the left stops ; the latter side being the first to assume cadaveric rigidity. The right vagus nerve seems to act more strongly than the left on the heart. Though Stocker found the left thorax to be more than half an inch largest about, the right bronchus is