That different types of faces and bodies are characteristic of different nations is a well-known fact. There is a familiar statement which I would quote here: “The law which rounds a dewdrop shapes a world.” Therefore, if certain laws produce different types in different races they also produce different shapes of hands and bodies as illustrative of the different characteristics. The intermingling and intermixing by marriage, etc., must naturally modify the pureness of the different types; but that it does not destroy the entire individuality cannot for a moment be doubted.
The Elementary Hand
Starting with the elementary hand, it is rarely if ever found in its purity among civilized nations. We find this type among the primitive races in extremely cold latitudes, as, for instance, among the Esquimaux and the inhabitants of Iceland, Lapland, and the northern portion of Russia and Siberia.
Such people are phlegmatic and emotionless; even the nerve centers of the body are not in a high state of development, therefore they do not feel pain as keenly as the other types. They are more animal in their instincts and brutal in their desires; they are devoid of aspirations, and have only sufficient mentality to make them distinct from the brute creation. In a slightly more developed form the elementary hand is found in more southern and civilized nations.
The Square Hand and the Nations Represented by It
The square hand, generally speaking, is found among the Swedes, Danes, Germans, Dutch, English, and Scotch. The chief characteristics which it p. 67 denotes are love of method, logic, reason, respect for authority and law, and conformity to conventionality and custom. It shows an undemonstrative and more or less unemotional nature; it will follow life’s beaten track with dogged stubbornness and tenacity of purpose, will build solid houses, railways, and churches; will kneel at the shrine of the useful, and will pay homage to the practical side of life.
The Philosophic
This is essentially the hand of the Oriental nations. In European countries, it is to this type or to the possessors of its modifications that we are indebted for the modernized principles of Buddhism, Theosophy, and all doctrines and ideas that tend in that direction. It is essentially the hand of the mystic or of the religious devotee. Individuals with these hands will endure any privation or self-denial in defense of the religion they follow. The world may call such people cranks; but the world crucified its Christ, and mocked and persecuted its greatest teachers. Its opinion, therefore, should only affect the scales of dross, not the balance of thought.
The Conic
This type, properly speaking, is peculiar to the south of Europe, but by the intermingling of races it has been carried far and wide over the world. It is largely found among Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, and Irish races. The distinctive characteristics which it denotes are, a purely emotional nature, impulse in thought and action, artistic feeling, impressionability and excitability. It has been designated “The Hand of Impulse.” Such hands are not the hands of money-makers, like the square or the spatulate. They show a lack of practical business sense, but nature compensates their owners with the poetic, the visionary, and the romantic.
The Spatulate
With all the varieties of national types that have found their way at some time or another to America; with all the admixture of races found in that enormous continent, the spatulate hand is the type which has to a great p. 68 extent swallowed up all the others. This hand, and, consequently, the characteristics that it represents, has to my mind played the important rôle in the history of that great country. As I may claim to be a cosmopolitan in every sense of the word, I can therefore take an unbiased standpoint in reading the character of nations as I would that of the individual. The spatulate hand, as I stated before, is the hand of energy, originality, and restlessness. It is the hand of the explorer and the discoverer, which terms can also be applied to discoveries in science, art, or mechanics. Spatulate hands are never conventional; they have little respect for law, less for authority. They are inventors, more from the quickness of their ideas than from the solidity of earnest work as exemplified by the square; they may utilize other men’s ideas, but they will try to improve upon them; they love risk and speculation; they are versatile, and their chief fault is their changeability—they shift from one thing to another with the mood of the moment; they are fanatics in their fads, enigmas in their earnestness; but, even with such faults, it is to a people many-sided and many-talented like this that the world must look for her new ideas, for the inventions and discoveries in science, religion, or materialism which must in years to come work out the evolution of humanity.
The Psychic
This peculiar type is not confined to any particular country or kindred; it is evolved sometimes among the most practical, sometimes among the most enthusiastic. Yet is it neither practical nor enthusiastic in itself; it may be an evolution of all the types, reaching into that plane in which there may be seven senses instead of five. Certain it is that its owners are not of the earth, earthy, nor yet of heaven—for they are human; they make up no distinct community, but are found in all and of all. It may be that, as their beautiful hands are not formed for the rough usage of this world, so their thoughts are not suited to the material things of life; their place may be in giving to mankind that which is but the reflection of mankind; thus in the shadow may we find the substance, and thus in the speculation that this type gives rise to may we find that wisdom that sees the fitness and the use of all things.