Casimir Stanislas d'Arpentigny, a French cavalry officer who retired from active service in 1844, spent his later years pursuing a private study of the hand and published his findings in 1839 as La Chirognomonie, a title he coined by combining the Greek words for hand and for law or judgment. His method broke deliberately from the older European tradition of chiromancy, which read fortune and character from the lines crossing the palm, and instead studied the hand's overall external shape, the length and thickness of the fingers, the proportion of palm to fingers, the presence or absence of visible knots at the finger joints, treating these gross physical features as more reliable indicators of a person's underlying temperament and intelligence than the fine, changeable lines chiromancy relied on.
From this method he derived a typology still used by palmists today, sorting hands into categories such as the elementary hand, associated with simple or brutish natures, the philosophic hand, marked by knotted joints and long fingers and associated with analytical, questioning minds, and the artistic or psychic hand, associated with intuition and aesthetic sensitivity, among several others. D'Arpentigny presented his system as a serious empirical classification akin to contemporary physiognomy and phrenology, both then treated as respectable if contested sciences, rather than as fortune telling, a framing that shaped how palmistry would present itself to a skeptical nineteenth century public for the rest of the century.