In making up your mind about the client under examination, it is essential, that you know at the start the amount of energy possessed, for it must be apparent that no matte how brilliant they may be, if they are lazy, the brilliancy will be wasted in idle dreaming, instead of being turned into active channels. It is to the consistency of the hands, by which we mean their hardness or softness under pressure, that you must look for information on the above subjects.
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. What you 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 callous places as necessarily hard, though I grant you that it requires some energy to do the amount of work necessary to produce this callousness. For example, the bicycle has developed callousness in many hands where it was never known before, and all sports, such as golf, bowling, or rowing, may make these hardened spots in the hands where the pursuit of pleasure, and not real energy, has been the underlying incentive. Evidences of energy thus generated are only temporary, and must not be considered as indicating a force that is inherent in the subject, for these same people might never have labored hard enough at any useful toil, to produce callousness in their hands. I am explicit in this matter cause I want you to be careful not to accept a surface indication as denoting real energy, for you can readily see into how much error this would lead you. The consistency of the hands may be separated into four classes. These are:

The Flabby hand
In the grasp which I have described in the opening of this chapter you will find, when the fingers are closed around a flabby hand, that it offers no resistance to your pressure. If you squeeze the hand very firm the flesh and bone seem to crush together, producing the impression on your mind that if you pressed much harder, the flesh would be squeezed out through your fingers. This is the softest hand you can find, and in the matter of physical energy is absolutely 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 physical, luxury, and beautiful surroundings, but will not work to gain them. It is the hand of those who prefer 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. In plain words, its owner is the idle, luxurious, sensitive dreamer, who will not work, will not exert, but like a ship at sea without a wind, is content to drift. Such a person is often highly gifted, possessing fine mounts of Apollo strongly lined, and every indication of creative power, yet, as you close your fingers over the flabby hand, you know that the vital requisite to the development of these talents, energy, is absent, and a negative life is ahead. This laziness will naturally modify all other qualities, will bring to naught the ambition 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 their tongue instead of their sword, add laziness to the imaginings of the Lunar subject, and even the Venusian will feel the blight of inertia, sapping the vital energy of their nature.

Soft hand
In this case, the hand will not have the boneless, flabby feeling under your tough, yet will be distinctly soft. You will find more difficulty amount women in distinguishing the flabby hands from the soft, for women's hands are naturally softer than men's. But by observing the lack of bony feeling in the hand under pressure, and following closely the description of the flabby hand, you cannot fail to attain a clear idea of how to distinguish between the two. The best way to gain practice in this matter is to press the hands of all the people with whom you shake hands, accustoming yourself to distinguish the sensation they give to your touch, by which practice you can quickly learn to differentiate soft from flabby consistency. The soft hand is one which, while by no means approaching the laziness indicated by flabby hands, is still deficient in energy. There is this important difference between the two. The flabby hand will always be lazy while the faculty of energy can be developed and increased in the subject whose hands are merely soft. This is most important to note, for you may induce the possessor of a soft hand to build up their energy and develop their talents, while you cannot, to any extent, induce the owner of flabby hand to improve.

Elastic
Next to soft consistency comes the elastic. This is a hand which you cannot crush in your grasp. It has, as you close your fingers on it, a feeling of springiness, of life, and resistance. It seems, when you press it which the tips of your fingers, as though the flesh rebounded like rubber would under similar pressure. It lack entirely the spongy quality of flabby or soft hands, and no word can more adequately convey the idea of its feeling under pressure than elasticity. It lacks entirely the spongy quality of flabby or soft hands. You find it best ex amplified among active men and women, those who not only talk, but who also act. If you will pick out one of this class for example, one whom you know to be a hustling business man, which means one who has everything about their place full of life and action, you will find he has the elastic consistency; ask to examine their hands, and thus make yourself familiar with the sensation they produce when grasping them. When you find this elastic consistency, it shows that the person has life, energy, push, vim, and vigor, and that in all walks of life they are up and doing. They do no more work than is necessary, but they do enough. They do not overexert, but they occupy the plane of a happy medium, and his life, action, and energy is the moving force in the work to-day. They are trustworthy if of a good type, takes responsibility well, and in the battle of lie is the victor. The elastic hand pus 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 fingers.
- It makes the ambition of the Jupiterian a lever to force them upward,
- brings out the best side of the moody Saturnian
- makes the Apollonian a money maker,
- the Mercurian more active, shrews and successful.
- The Martian becomes 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 energy of grace
You must, in handling this elastic consistency, realize that it is the embodiment of healthful energy, evenly distributed, and that the subject will surely make their way through the world. It may be summed up fully, I think, by saying that an elastic hand shows the activity of intelligent energy and force, in other words, well directed energy, the kind that occupies itself with being "sensibly energetic".

Hard Hands
Hard hands follow next, and play their part in the matter of consistency. They will not be so often encountered as soft or elastic hands for extreme types are much rarer than might be thought possible. Hard hands, as a rule, are those which belong to less intelligent people, and the skin will be found coarser in texture. The hard hand will give no sign of yielding under
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 them, but is what they expect. 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 quickly and readily. The "elastic" brain which guides that elastic hand can change itself, can adapt itself to new conditions, the "hard" brain which guides the hard hand cannot easily take in a new idea. It is difficult for such a "hard" brain to advance with the progress of modern ideas, it is difficult for the possessor to get out of the rut of routine and custom, and to the original. Thus when you find the hard hand, it will show you the kind of energy that exerts, labors, and toils from a knowledge that labor must be done, but without great brain activity behind this toil. It is energy, indeed, but not the most "intelligent energy".

Thus between this 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 determined. 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 people are willing to work, to exert, to act, you want also to find intelligence directing effort, which unfortunately is not always the case with the hard hand. When examining for consistency carefully note both hands. If the left is soft 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 increasing or decreasing in energy. If increasing they are more likely to have success and vice versa.