IV The Full Use of Both Hands

All that Hands Can Do

   This final installment on the hand could, in principle, be endless. The subject is the two hands (at the end of arms), the fingers of which are in any possible configuration, many with the same in both hands and an incalculable number with the two arrangements differing from each other. This discussion will be brief and will only hint at that profusion.
   Start with the use of hands in a symphony orchestra. Every instruments requires their use, though such as the woodwinds and brass, get their main impetus from the lungs, via the mouth. Still, not many instruments can do without hands. The bugle is one of them, if you ignore that hands have to hold the instrument.

   But playing musical instruments is but one of an indefinitely large number of occupations that have to be performed by hands. Moreover, most of these themselves require a multiplicity of configurations. Take cooking: that calls for anything from chopping onions to stirring a kettle full of soup—and much more.

   You can see why I made two apparently contradictory comments about this last discussion of the use of hands: that it might well be endless and that I will keep this final segment short. Short because readers don’t need me to tell them some of the very many things hands can do; and endless just because there are an uncountable number of such. Including scratching one’s head or behind, the mentioning of which has the special merit of acknowledging the existence of fingernails.