Also called: The lowest type · D'Arpentigny type 1

Where on the hand: Recognised from the whole hand: extremely short, thick-set and heavy, with the palm longer than the longest finger.

What it looks like: A thick, rounded palm; coarse, rough skin; short clumsy fingers; the thumb short, thick and set very low on the palm; very few lines, and those coarse and deep.

The first and lowest of D'Arpentigny's seven types: the hand governed by appetite and by the immediate moment, with little reflection and no idealism. The shorter and thicker the hand, the nearer, in the old formulation, to the purely animal nature.

Western reading: The first of Casimir Stanislas D'Arpentigny's seven types, carried into English by Cheiro.

Read with care: This type is a nineteenth-century class judgement dressed as observation — it equates manual labour and coarse skin with brutality and being uneducable. Record it as history of the discipline, not as a reading to apply to anyone.