Ambidexterity or two-handedness and two-brainedness. An argument for natural development and rational education.

  • Jackson, John.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ambidexterity or two-handedness and two-brainedness. An argument for natural development and rational education. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    precedes the other. The parrot must rest itself upon the right leg before it proceeds to use the disengaged leg; and, also, the young parrot must first learn to support itself on the right before it can learn the after act of feeding itself with the free foot. In other words, the original selection is of the foot which shall serve as a support, not of the foot which shall be used for feeding— and this selection is in favour of the right as a rule. Repeated observations of birds of various orders, other than the parrots, have led me to believe that not only is the left leg used as much as the right for perching, but that the very same individual uses sometimes one, sometimes the other, indifferently. Parrots are, in fact, the only birds in which I have been able to detect with actual certainty any pre-eminence in one side above the other. In this very plausible reasoning of Dr. Ogle's we think there are two or three mistakes, one of which is the assertion that the young parrots have first of all to learn to support themselves on one leg. Is this a fact, or do birds instinctively perch on one leg from the very first in the same way that young ducks swim at the very first plunge and quite as well as their mothers ? I have never seen chickens trying to stand on one leg any more than trying to walk on two, nor have I ever seen a duck or a goose or a duckling or a gosling trying to swim with one foot, although I have frequently observed them, and more especially swans, use one, and either foot, singly, according as they wanted to go in the right or left direction. Our contention, therefore, is that the young parrot neither learns to support itself on one leg nor learns to feed itself with the other, but that from the first, with this bird, both actions are instinctive or automatic, and that any selection it may make of the right or left leg and foot for purposes of perching or feeding is determined entirely and exclusively by the circumstances or the occasion.