Now that we have reviewed together - and interpreted - the diverse elements that enter into the exterior physiognomy of a hand and examined suc-cessivdy,

The Hand as a Whole,

The Hand Proper,

The Palm,

The Palm Proper,

The Fingers,

Each Finger Separately,

The Finger Tips,

The Finger Knots,

The Phalanges.

The Thumb, I have two more chapters to bestow upon the Study of Chirognomy. The present one will be devoted to a com-bination of these various indications as are found in Fourteen Pure and Mixed Types, some of them beautifully delineated by d'Arpentigny, the others prepared by me from the most frequent examples that have come under my notice.

In the chapter closing this Part Second, I will give you an adaptation of Desbarrolles' semi-humorous, semi-serious method of judging people's dispositions from a cursory examination of their hands and without letting them suspect that they are under examination.

So far I have called your careful attention to four categories of Finger Tips: the Pointed, the Conical, the Square, the Spatulate, These - in their purity and without admixture of contrary elements - characterize respectively:

I. The Psychic Hand (pointed), II. The Artistic Hand (conical), III, The Useful Hand [square), IV. The Necessary Hand (spamlate), giving them here the names adopted by d'Arpentigny himself. To those have to be added:

V. The Philosophical Hand (knotted), which, as we know, presents itself with Tips of the conical or square, or spatu-tate shape;

VI. The Elementary Hand, and VIII. The Brutal Murderer's Hand, already much more mixed in their characteristics, and, in many respects, returning to the lower animal features. Of the Elementary Hand, at its worst. I find two very close counterfeits in

VIII, The Brutal Murder's Hand. and

IX. The Congenital Idiot's Hand. These lead me to those commonplace types of Hands, which combine in their Finger Tips two, three and even four of the original four shapes:

X., XI., XII. and XIII. are descriptions of the hands most frequently met with among these Mixed Types. Finally:

XIV. The Woman's Hand will give us an insight into the tendencies and most frequent characteristics of the weaker sex.

The reader may think perhaps that when I indulge in long, somewhat flow-try descriptions of certain distinct Types of Hands, abandoning for a moment the. sober teachings embodied in this work, I am playing false to my pledge to place practicality ever to the front, leaving severely aside all dithyrambic outbursts or fanciful picturings of impossible cases. Such imaginative sketches, I admit, will be found in this chapter and also at the end of Part Third in the minute descriptions therein inserted of the Seven Signatures of thte Mounts; but the fact of my introducing them in this book, borrowing their main elements and much of their wording from d'Ar-pentigny and Desbarrolles, is not in any manner of means an act of desertion from the standard I have adopted as my own.

No, here again, even here, I have aimed to be directly useful to the future Hand-reader, whose tuition I have undertaken and whose mind has to be trained through more than one kind of drill before it acquires the suppleness that is one of the essentials of a successful Palmist. The gift of generalizing the ideas, principles and rules once laid down, understood and memorized, is one that cannot be too soon cultivated; for when the time comes for you to take hands within your grasp, their owners will not ask you for a lesson in Palmistry. but for information of a clear, broad, definite character, about their physical, mental and moral natures, from which can alone be deduced such facts in their past and future lives as the lines may or may not reveal. And how are you going to avoid "giving a stone when you are asked for bread," if you do not learn, from the Masters, how to grasp, to combine, to harmonize the separate elements that constitute now Chirog-nomy, now the study of the Mounts, now Chiromancy in its infinite minutiae?

Such a learning is obtained from just such descriptions as I have inserted in this chapter, and in another one further on; and although the perusing of these particular pages could be left out of the curriculum of your present studies without depriving you of any absolutely indispensable clement of knowledge, yet in the training of a Palmistic mind the reading of those sketches of leading types occupies, in my opinion, a place-that it would be decidedly unwise to leave empty.