50 Years Ago

There are many puzzles about left handedness. Left handers are often less consistent in using the left hand than right handers in using the right; the incidence of left handedness is raised in many pathological groups and yet left handers may be of high intelligence; several different solutions have been offered to the problem of which cerebral hemisphere leads in speech functions in left handers; left handers seem to be more likely to recover from aphasias than right handers. It is the purpose of this article to describe a model of the inheritance of handedness and cerebral dominance which, together with a hypothesis about the direction of shifts of dominance, might account for many puzzling facts.

From Nature 3 October 1964

100 Years Ago

Every important town in Great Britain has established at least one great technical college at large cost in building and apparatus, with staffs of professors and teachers (always badly paid), and it is found that for their first two years the students have to be kept at great cost to the country learning those simple principles of science which they ought to have learnt at school. It is found that they are not only ignorant, but they have none of the habits of thought and scientific method which school laboratory work induces. The clever ones, if they leave school at seventeen, recover from the effects of a school education which prepared men only for being lawyers or clergyman; but the average man finds that he has been prepared only to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water to the real engineer.

From Nature 1 October 1914