telling chiromancy. The lines on the palm which that art professed to read may tell the occupation and habitual movements of the hand; and, because they are most deeply engraven in the harsh dry skins of the phlegmatic and melancholic, they may tell somewhat also of the general constitution and temperament; but they can indicate no more than this. It is in the size and shape of the hand, and of its several parts, that we are to look for the real indications of the mind, of which it is at once so instructive and so obedient an instrument. In these particulars it is a real hand-book, in which the character may be read almost as clearly as in his head or face.

We need not stay to point out the perfect humanity of the hand, or to tell all its distinctive features, the perfection of its utility, and the mathematical exactness of its construction. Its chief contrast with the paws that are most like it is in the fingers of these last being so short, in proportion to the length of the metacarpal part (i. e., of the hand without the fingers and the thumb), or else in their being altogether so small. The bear's paw illustrates the first of these contrasts; and few things can mark intellectual inferiority more than do short convergent incurved fingers. The ape's hand illustrates the second; and mental weakness may always be suspected where, with a very small hand, the thumb is especially short and weak and apish. By similar comparisons may be interpreted the hardness and horny stiffness of the palm which one sometimes finds independent of hard labour or disease; the excessive brute-like growth of hair and nails before old age, and other similar signs.

The differences of hands, according to sex and age, are equally significant. The woman's hand, independently of the effects of different occupations, is naturally smaller, narrower, softer, less hairy, and more delicate than the man's, and its fingers are more roundly formed. When these characters are reversed, they mark, as clearly as any other misplaced features do, the similarly misplaced mind: they betray the too strong-minded woman, and the effeminate man. In advancing years, from childhood onwards, the changes of the hands are scarcely less significant and striking than those of the face, and they have the same meaning. Like the smooth round forehead, proper to the child, so the small, soft, delicate, childish hand, when it is retained in manhood, is a sure sign of a childish disposition, with no great intellectual gifts and no strength of will. And when, before old age, the hand is lean, bony, and dry, it indicates that want of warmth of feeling and of fancy, and that predominance of cold sagacity to which old age is naturally prone.

Independently of these general differences among hands, mani

fold,

fold, even thousandfold, varieties of individual form are to be found. They may be described, in about four chief groups, by referring them to as many types of form. Carus adopts four, fusing some of those six which D'Arpentigny, the first true chirognomist, arranged. These four he names, severally, the elemental, the motor, the sensitive, and the psychical hands.

Elemental hands are such as betray a certain approximation at once to the hand of the little child and to the paw of the most man-like brutes. They are distinguished by the metacarpal part being both long and broad; the palm large, thick, and hard; the fingers short, thick, and squared at their ends, the thumb stumpy and often turned back; the nails short, strong, and hard. These characters are modified according to sex, having more of refinement in women, and of coarseness in men; but, in general, their chief feature is a coarseness, and, as it were, a want of finish, in the construction of the hand. And such hands symbolise a rough, unfinished mind, a mind lowly developed, obtuse intelligence, slow resolution, dullness of feelings. They are found especially among the common people; and combined, as they often are, with large though coarsely modelled heads, they represent the material strength of a nation, its work, its man-power. These make the show of hands at the hustings; these are the mighty unwashed. But they are found in higher classes, too; and there, though washed and gloved, and never seamed or hardened by appropriate toil, the elemental hands betray the same want of mental refinement, the same rough unfinished nature.

The Motor hand, which is especially the male hand, is characterized partly by its great size, partly by its strength of bone and muscle, and its strong projecting joints and sinews. The palm is nearly square; the fingers longer than in the elemental hand, but very strong, large-jointed, and broad-tipped; the thumb especially strong, and with a full ball; the nails suitably large, and of elongated quadrangular shape; the skin of the back firm and strong, and usually but slightly hairy.

Such a hand symbolises strength of will, and aptness for strong sustained efforts of mind. They who have such hands are likely to be less finely sensitive and less intelligent than resolute and strong willed. The old Roman character might be the type of the motor-handed men; and the hands of Roman senators and emperors in works of art have almost always the genuine motor characters. The thumb, which is in all hands the most significant, because the most essentially human, member, is especially so in these; its large size always symbolising an energetic nature.

The Sensitive is the proper feminine hand. It is never very large,

large, and is often rather below the module in its length, and all its textures are delicate. In the palm, length predominates a little over breadth; the fingers are not proportionally longer than in the motor hand, but the thumb is decidedly smaller, and much more delicate. The fingers are divided in soft and oval forms, with full rounded tips; the nails, nearly equilateral, are remarkably fine and elastic.

Men with hands thus formed are generally distinguished by feeling, by fancy, and by wit, more than by intellectual acuteness and strength of will. They commonly are of sensitive, sometimes of psychical, constitution, and, generally, of sanguine temperament. But good specimens of sensitive hands are seldom found except in the higher and well-educated classes (the forms that are near the type will be mentioned presently); in the lower classes of northern countries they are seen only in women.

The Psychical hand, the most beautiful and the rarest of all the forms, is that which is most unlike the elemental and the childish hand. It is of moderate size in proportion to the whole stature. It should measure in its length just one module; the palm is a little longer than broad, never much furrowed or folded, but marked with single large lines. The fingers are fine, slender, and rather elongated; their joints are never prominent; their tips are rather long, taper, and delicately rounded; and they have fine nails of similar shape. The thumb is slender, well-formed, and only moderately long. The skin of the whole hand is delicate, and, even in a man, has but very little hair.

In their perfection psychical hands can be seen in only the bloom and strength of life. In childhood and in youth the form is not attained; in old age, it is spoiled by the comparative increase of the bones and joints and by the wrinkling of the skin.

Such rare hands are found with none but rare minds. They indicate, Carus says, a peculiar purity and interior grandeur of feeling, combined with simple clearness in knowledge and in will. And D'Arpentigny speaking, as usual, of the hands as if they were the whole mind, says,- Such hands add to the works of the thinker, as the artist does to the work of the artizan— beauty, ideality; they gild them with a sunbeam, they raise them on a pedestal; they open to them the portals of men's hearts. The soul, forgotten and left behind by philosophic hands, is the guide of these; truth in love and sublimity is their end, expansion their means.'

But, it must be repeated, good examples of psychical hands are rare, unless where, through many generations, the mind has been highly educated. When they occur among the crowd of

men,

men, they often mark those who fail, because an inner vocation to some higher and unattainable sphere of action unfits them for the rough handicrafts of the lower classes. D'Arpentigny believes that psychical hands are most frequent in Asia, in the countries of the Caucasian race, and that in Europe they occur most often in Germany; but Carus gives the honour (may we say the palm?) to England, especially to the English women of the higher ranks.

These are the grand types of hands. But of hands, as of all other parts, the great majority fall short of the typical form, and have such intermediate or mixed forms, as must be interpreted by an estimate of the degrees in which they approximate to one or more of the types. The most frequent of all hands are such as are intermediate, or transitional, between the elemental and the motor or the sensitive. Those that make the transition from the sensitive to the motor type, in which, with a sensitive foundationstructure there is a more motor character, and strength of the fingers and their joints, are the hands which D'Arpentigny called artistic' and useful.' They are the eminently handy' sort; and are often seen among mechanics, artists, and musicians. Transition-forms between the sensitive and the psychical are not rare; they may indicate a poetic mind, but they are especially met with when high training and refined care of the whole organism, and especially of the hands, has been maintained for many generations. These might be called the well-bred,' or the aristocratic,' hands: D'Arpentigny has named them 'Mains de race.' Lastly, transitions from the motor to the psychical form symbolise great thinking powers: they are the philosophic' hands.

6

Whatever be the form of the hand, its significance will be modified if it be not according to rule in the characters appropriate to sex and age. For example, if a man have a feminine psychical hand, he will lack the grandeur and clearness of thought which the psychical hand should, in his sex, testify: and a woman with a manly psychical hand will want something of the complete beauty of the true feminine mind. So, as we have already intimated, the roundness, softness, and fleshiness, appropriate to childhood, will mark, whatever be the form of hand with which they are combined, a comparative feebleness of character; while the leanness and dryness, that should be delayed till old age, will, in earlier life, tell of hardness and narrowness in the character, whatever it may be, that is symbolised by the general form of the hand.

The Foor has symbols very similar to those of the hand. On

the

the general principle, that those parts, which present the most distinctive specific characters of man, are most significant of the human mind, none should be more symbolical than the feet, whereon Man rests and moves in that erect posture, in which he bears himself above all other creatures, and is av9pwTos, the being with the upturned eye. Their forms are, indeed, various, and always characteristic: or, if less so than those of the hands, it is in those respects in which the hands, as being peculiarly sensitive organs, are more than the feet significant of the mind's sensibility.

Of course, all those forms of the human foot are indicative of a low mental state which are like the feet of other mammalia. And, the chief errors in this direction are,-the flatness of the foot (independent of disease), which makes it like that of a bear or other plantigrade: the diminutive size, in comparison with the leg, in which it lacks its characteristic fitness for supporting an erect body; and the narrowness, with shortness of the great toe, and defective projection of the heel, by which the contrast between man's foot and the ape's is lessened. These characters, by which the foot loses its human distinction, may be read in the same way as the corresponding lowered forms of the hand; and so may those in which the childish form is retained; or the womanly, or the manly, form is misplaced.

The typical forms of feet are described, by Carus, as the elemental, the sensitive motor, the pure motor, and the athletic motor. The elemental foot, like the hand of the same name, is that which, though it has grown to its full size and proportion, has not been developed beyond the childish form. It is coarse,

plump, and clumsy; too flat-soled; short, broad, and fleshy. The ancles are thick and shapeless; the balls and joints of the toes are large. Such feet are commonly found in conjunction with elemental hands, and have the same import; they are the feet of the mass, singly powerless, in multitude mighty.

The motor-sensitive foot, corresponding with the sensitive. hand, is the proper foot of woman. It is small, and smooth, and slender; a narrow foot, with but little projection of the heel, and no projection of the joints or sinews; the ball of the heel and of the great toe are not large or prominent; the nails are small and finely textured. The ideal of this foot is in the Venus de' Medici; the caricature of it in the outstretched, flattened, ape-ward foot of the Negro. In a man, the sensitive-motor foot will stamp a feeble and effeminate character, unless it be associated with a welldeveloped and harmonious form of the head and of all other parts. Thus associated, such a foot indicates great elastic power, and energetic speed of action: such is the foot of Mercury in antique sculpture: and among different races it is most frequent (though