EVERYDAY ORACLES · LESSON 8 OF 9 · 15 MIN
Fingerprints, and the Hand of Science
What the ridges on the fingertips are, how Galton sorted them into arches, loops and whorls, why the police took them up and the palmists after, what dermatoglyphics can and cannot tell — and how to read your own ten.
The lines of the palm change a little through a life; the ridges on the fingertips do not. They form before birth and stay, which is why the police wanted them, why the geneticists studied them, and why the palmists, late in the day, added them to the hand. This lesson is the one part of hand-reading with a laboratory behind it, and it is worth knowing where that laboratory stops.