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The author, an English Psychologist, has designed this text in an attempt to contribute some new diagnostic methods to psychology and psychiatry. She begins her enterprise with a consideration of the relation of the hand to intelligence. The discussion reads interestingly enough, but her approach is based upon various notions, many of which are still in the hypothetical phase. Illustrations of the hands are bound in the back of the book and, unfortunately, most of them are palm prints not too well done. The four examples given relating the hand to the intelligence are composed of dogmatic, non-proven assertions which may or may not be true, and there is apparently no way of finding out from this book.
The endocrine factors are next considered, and the author has been working 16 years on this phase and lists as a result of her researches three varieties of pituitary hands, three kinds of thyroid hand types, one eunocoid and an adrenal hand. She gives a bit of structural description, and then lapses into the pseudo-fictions so dear to the heart of popular writers, such as, “Hyperpituitary people are very moody with a tendency to a quick temper and depression. They are irritable and excitable. Obsessional or paranoiac tendencies are frequently found. One young man, whose hands I examined, showed features of violence, especially in his sexual life, which led him into crime. Hyper-excitability and hyper-sexuality are often symptoms at the onset of the illness, and give way at a later stage to impotence and loss of interest in life. While one finds hypomania associated in the beginning of acromegaly, depression is the prevailing mood of the mind later on.”
The author feels she can differentiate these varying hands; the reviewer wishes he could from the descriptions given.
Development of hands next comes in for a general discussion, and here simple psychological platitudes, primarily following the work of Kretschmer and Sheldon are summarized. The hand mirrors, apparently, th