Take hold of the hands firmly, allow your fingers to close all around them and gently squeeze, until you have found out the amount of resistance opposed to your pressure. You should then quietly loosen your grasp, and press your fingers firmly against the palms, Being careful to do it in spots where there are no callous places. Wha tyou wish to discover, by this examination, is the hardness, softness, flabbiness, or resisting power
of the muscles of the hand. First of all, you must not regard a hand which has callus places as necessarily hard, though I grant you that it requires
some energy to do the amount of work necessary to produce this callousness. A lot of sports produce callouses, however do not confuse a surface
indication as denoting real energy.

There are four consistencies of hands

1/ Flabby = no resistance to pressure = idle luxurious, sensitive dreamer, who will not work, will not exert, but just drifts. If you sqeeze the hand very firmly the flesh and bone seem to crush together, producing the impression on your mind that if you pressed much harder, the flesh would be sqeezed out through your fingers. This is the softest hand you can find, and in the matter of physical enrgy is abdolutely deficient. It is the hand of one who dreams, but does not act, who loves, but whose love finds expression only in words, not deeds. It is the hand of one that desires ease, mental and physcial, luxury, and beautiful surroundings, but will not work to gain them. It is the hand of him who refers to live in squalor, so long as there is plenty of rest and no exertion, rather than to enjoy better living, if labor is the price of the improved condition. Such a person is oten highly gifted, possissing fine mounts of Apollo stongly lined, and very indication of creative power, yet, as you close your finger over the flabby hand, you know that the vital requisite to the defelopment of these talents, ENERGY, is absent, and a negative life is ahead. This laziness will modify all other qualities, will bring to naught the ambityion of a Jupiterian, increase the sadness of a Saturnian, diminish the brilliancy and achievement of the Apollonian, spoil the energy of the Mercurian, make the martian a fighter with his tongue instead of his sword, add laziness to the imaginings of the Lunar subject, and even the Venusian will feel the blight of inertia, sapping the vital evergy of his nature.

2. Soft = Still deficient in Energy.

Flabby = Always lazy
Soft = Energy can be developed
In this case, the hand will not have the boneless, flabby feeling under your touch, yet will be distinctly soft. You will find more difficutly amoung women in distingushing the flabby than mens.

3. Elastic = SENSIBLY ENERGETIC .
Person has life, energy, push, vim and vigour, and in all walks of life he is up and doing. He does not overexert, but he occupies the place of a happy medium, his life, action, and energy is the moving force in the world today. He is trustworthy if of a good type, takes responsibitily well, and in the battle of life is the winner. This is a hand which you cannot crush in your grasp. It has, as you close your finger on it, a feeling of springiness, of life, and resistance. It seems, when you press it with the tips of your finger, as though the flesh rebounded like rubber would under similar pressure. It lacks entirely the spongy quality of flabby or soft hands. You find it best exemlified aomong ACTIVE men and women, those who not only
talk, but who also act. The elastic hand puts vitality into all human qualities. It adds exactness to the square tip and finger, activity to the spatulate, makes the conic do some real thing with their genius of impulse, and (though not often seen in this subject), even adds life and vigor to psychic finger. It makes the ambitione Apollonian a moneymaker, the Mercurian more active, shrewd, and successful. The Martian mecomes a calm leader, a balanced fighter, but one who accomplishes great deeds. It makes the Lunar mount give forth music and poetry, and Venus stands for active love and the envy of grace. 3/4 40

4. Hard Hands = Less intelligent, likes manual labour
They will not be so often encountered as soft or elastic hands for extreme types are much rarer than might be thought possible. Hard nads, as a rule,
are those which belong to less intelligent people, and the skin will be found coarser in testure. The hard hand will give no sign of yielding under you
pressure, will have no spring, no elasticity, but a hardness that resists any effort to dent it. When you encounter such a hand, you will know at once that the subject is of the most active kind, that manual labor is not a burden to him, but is hwat he expects. You may ally, in your mind, this hand with the mind behind it, and in doing so you will picture a brian that is somewhat dense, that does not receive and assimilate impressions and ideas quiackly and readily. The "elastic" brain which guides that elastic hand can change itself, can adapt itself to new conditions, the "hard" bain which guides the hard hand cammot easily take in a new idea. It is difficult for such a "hard" brain to advance with the progress of modern ideas, it is difficutl for the possessor to get out of the rut of routine and cutom, and to the original. Thus when you find the hard hand, it will show you the kind of energy that exerts. labours, and toils form a knowledge that labor must be done, but without great brain activity behind this toil. It is enrgy, indeed, but not the most "intelligent energy".

Thus between jthis hard hand and the flabby hand you find many degrees of consistency, and in order to get the correct idea search until you find the
extreme types after which the medium developments will be easily dtermined. The hard hand modifies all the types, as it render them less elevated and intelligent. As laziness spoils brilliant people, so excess of ill-directed energy will also spoil them. And while you want to find that poeple are
willing to work, to exert, to act, you want also to find intelligence directing effort, which unfortunately is not aslways the case with the hard hand. When examining for cinsistency carefully note both hands. If the left is fot and the right elastic you know energy has been increased. If the left is hard and the right soft you know that the subject has grown lazy. In this way you can judge whether the subject is incresing or decreasing in energy. If
increasing he is more likely to have success and vice versa.