Louisa Baillie
Why? In our first years of life are we encouraged, and we ourselves desire, to learn of things beyond our skin barrier using touch, especially through our hands, attached as they are to the extremities of two highly mobile limbs, each hand with four fingers and an opposing thumb, 27 bones, 17 intrinsic muscles, 18 extrinsic muscles 
originating in the forearm, specialised nerve endings (including Merkel’s discs, Pacinian, Meissner’s and Ruffini’s corpuscles and hair follicle receptor lanceolate endings) which detect light or deep pressure, position, vibration, shapes, edges—hands that are trained to grasp, squeeze, pinch, pat, poke, point, that can stroke a polished surface of marble or plaster or a young baby’s skin and on that smoothness feel the merest rough patch of, say, a tiny grain of salt. Yet by the time a child in our culture is about seven years of age, her hands are already semi-retired. Why?
Artsenta: the First 30 Years by Kath Beattie
