History

William Benham spent thirty years trying to make palmistry a science

He collected hand prints for three decades and produced the most systematic palmistry text ever written in English. He never once tested whether it worked.

William George Benham was an American, born in 1860, who became interested in hands as a boy and never stopped. The result, published in 1900, was The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading — around eight hundred pages, densely illustrated, and startlingly unlike the fortune-telling literature around it.

The mounts, organised

Benham’s central move was to make the mounts — the fleshy pads at the base of each finger, around the thumb, and along the outer edge of the palm — the foundation of the reading rather than an afterthought to the lines. He gave seven of them, and argued that the dominant mount sets the type of the whole hand, with the lines then modifying it.

• Jupiter, beneath the index finger: ambition, the wish to lead, self-regard
• Saturn, beneath the middle finger: seriousness, solitude, patience with dull work
• Apollo or Sun, beneath the ring finger: display, taste, the wish to be seen
• Mercury, beneath the little finger: quickness, persuasion, trade
• Mars, in two positions: assertion and endurance respectively
• Venus, the large pad around the thumb: appetite, warmth, physical vitality
• Luna, the outer edge below the little finger: imagination, restlessness, the pull of elsewhere

A modern reader can object to every one of those meanings and still admire the architecture. Benham was doing something the tradition had not previously bothered with: building a system where the parts constrain each other, so that a reading can be wrong rather than merely vague.

The method he had, and the method he did not

Benham genuinely worked. He collected prints and photographs across decades. He compared hands. He revised. He wrote about hands he had misread. That is more intellectual honesty than the field usually manages, and it is why his book survived while a hundred contemporary pamphlets did not.

What he never did — and the word "scientific" in his title makes this conspicuous — was run a single controlled test. He never took a set of hands, produced readings, and had anyone independent check whether the right reading went to the right person. The whole edifice rests on the practitioner’s own judgement that the system fits, which is precisely the judgement a system like this is best at flattering.

What we take from him

Two things. The first is the mount system itself, which we use, because it is the most coherent framework the tradition produced and because a reading that names where a pad is full is at least talking about something that exists on your hand.

The second is his habit of writing down what he actually saw before writing what he thought it meant. Every reading we produce begins with a record layer that does exactly that: the physical facts, including the ones the photograph failed to show, with no meaning attached. It is a Benham habit, and it is the part of his work that has aged best.