The Book of the Hand: The Science of Modern Palmistry

Ed Heron-Allen's The Book of the Hand: The Science of Modern Palmistry, Ward, Lock and Co, 1885, is a practitioner treatise, not academic scholarship. Its strength is that it is a detailed and influential statement of Victorian era palmistry from a writer who treated the practice systematically, useful as evidence of what the tradition held at the time. Its limit is that its claims were never subjected to scientific testing and should be read as the tradition's own account of itself, not as an established finding about what hand features actually predict.