Lesson 34. Section 1. Interpreting Hands.
Like most of us, I was pretty sceptical about palmistry, and I still am to some extent, but I have found one or two interesting things which I'd like to mention.

There are in fact, three kinds of hand interpretation which have to be considered. Most people tend to think immediately of chiromancy when they hear about palmistry, the study of the lines on the hand. This suffers from a bad press really, because of the gypsy fortune-teller association it has, but I will explain more fully about that later.

The second type of hand interpretation is called chirognomy. This is concerned with the shape of the hand, the thickness and form of the palm, length of fingers and thumb, flexibility and so on.

Then dermatoglyphics is the name given to the study of the ridges and furrows which make a pattern on our hands. It is this, incidentally, which is the basis for police identification fingerprints and so on.

I want to speak briefly today about the first two of these, which is where the bulk of my research was done, and I'll start by saying something about chirognomy.

The hand is divided into four areas, which I will briefly describe by using this diagram here on the screen. There is, by the way, a connection with astrology.