Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny was born in 1798 and spent much of his working life as an officer in the French cavalry, reaching the rank of captain. Alongside his military career he pursued a private, decades long study of the human hand, developing a classification system based on overall shape and proportion rather than on the lines crossing the palm, which earlier chiromancy had focused on almost exclusively. He set his findings out in La Chirognomonie, ou l'art de reconnaitre les tendances de l'intelligence d'apres les formes de la main, published in Paris in 1839, coining the term chirognomy to name the new, shape based branch of study he had founded.
D'Arpentigny sorted hands into a small set of basic types, elementary, spatulate, square, conic, philosophic, psychic and mixed among them, each said to correspond to a broad temperament and cast of mind, a scheme he presented as an empirical typology built from years of comparison rather than an inherited occult doctrine. He died in 1872, by which time his younger contemporary Adolphe Desbarrolles had already begun extending the field with a complementary study of the palm's lines, and the two men's combined systems became the foundation nearly every subsequent Western palmistry manual built on.