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D'Arpentigny was not only a soldier but also a very qualified person that is why he was socially linked with the two totally different classes of French society at that time. One was of scientists, mathematicians and engineers, while the second was of artists, poets and musicians. D'Arpentigny attended a party where the husbands were either scientists or mechanics, but their wives were interested in arts, fashion, beauty, music, movies, etc. D'Arpentiny observed that the fingers of the husbands were knotty, while wives’ had almost smooth and pointed fingers. This made D'Arpentigny to do an intensive scientific examination of the shape of the hands and fingers. He discovered that there was notable difference in the shape of fingers to be found on the hands. Scientists and mechanics had rather knotty fingers across the joints, whereas arts and beauty lovers had almost smooth fingers across the joints. Thus he concluded that different types of hand and finger joints reveal the secrets of different mentalities of people. It was a big statement at that time but proved true for all the later Palmists and still stands good today. This initial finding was the root of whole hand classification system, which he later introduced to the world.
D'Arpentigny contributed a lot to the knowledge of Palmistry and his classification system is still used today. He categorised hands into six basic types as:
This theory of classification has been widely used by most of the palmists and still practiced by many palmists.
Here is a thing to remember that D'Arpentigny's hand shape classification is only for the hands of men and not of the women. D'Arpentigny has a separate section on the shapes of women hand and clearly states that these six types were only for the classification of men’s hands. D'Arpentigny states that hands of the women are quite different from the hands of men and that is why this system is not to be used for assessing their hands. But unfortunately many new palmists do not realize this fact and wrongly apply this classification on the women’s hand, which simply did not work.
D'Arpentigny also gives importance to the shape of the thumb and fingers. He was the first to observe the intellectual significance of the shape, length, joints and tips of the fingers. D'Arpentigny is the first person to write on the chirognomy of the hand and the most remarkable aspect of D'Arpentigny's work is that he has absolutely nothing to say about the hand lines at all.
Criticism
D'Arpentigny's hand shape classification method is not really a very acceptable one. The biggest flaw is that it is not that systematic. The method that D'Arpentigny used to distinguish different hand types, is not good enough and the types are not adequately different from each other. It is actually quite rare to find the exact hand types as D'Arpentigny describes them and most of the hands represent a combination of the features. Actually there are seven classifications of hand shape and the seventh type is described as the “Mixed Hand”. It is a suitable category for all those hands that do not completely fit into any of the other six classifications of hand shape.
His observations and researches formed the basis of his only written work “La Chirognomie” in the year 1839. He gives a detailed description of each of the six main hand shape classifications and also gives considerable attention to the variations to be found in the Spatulate hand, which was obviously the most common type of hand shape to be found.
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