The heat and cold which it feels in such delicate degrees often escape the notice of other senses in thoughtless people; but a man knows how to distinguish them, however little time he may have bestowed in studying the anatomy of sentiments and the affairs of human life.  Thus the hand has a thousand ways of becoming dry, moist, hot, cold, soft, rough, unctuous.  The hand palpitates, becomes supple, grows hard and again is softened.  In fine it presents a phenomenon which is inexplicable so that one is tempted to call it the incarnation of thought.  It causes the despair of the sculptor and the painter when they wish to express the changing labyrinth of its mysterious lineaments.  To stretch out your hand to a man is to save him, it serves as a ratification of the sentiments we express.  The sorcerers of every age have tried to read our future destines in those lines which have nothing fanciful in them, but absolutely correspond with the principles of each one’s life and character.  When she charges a man with want of tact, which is merely touch, a woman condemns him without hope.  We use the expressions, the “Hand of Justice,” the “Hand of God;” and a coup de main means a bold undertaking.

To understand and recognize the hidden feelings by the atmospheric variations of the hand, which a woman almost always yields without distrust, is a study less unfruitful and surer than that of physiognomy.

In this way you will be able, if you acquire this science, to wield vast power, and to find a clue which will guide you through the labyrinth of the most impenetrable heart.  This will render your living together free from very many mistakes, and, at the same time, rich in the acquisition of many a treasure.

Buffon and certain physiologists affirm that our members are more completely exhausted by desire than by the most keen enjoyments.  And really, does not desire constitute of itself a sort of intuitive possession?  Does it not stand in the same relation to visible action, as those incidents in our mental life, in which we take part in a dream, stand to the incidents of our actual life?  This energetic apprehension of things, does it not call into being an internal emotion more powerful than that of the external action?  If our gestures are only the accomplishment of things already enacted by our thought, you may easily calculate how desire frequently entertained must necessarily consume the vital fluids.  But the passions which are no more than the aggregation of desires, do they not furrow with the wrinkle of their lightning the faces of the ambitious, of gamblers, for instance, and do they not wear out their bodies with marvelous swiftness?

These observations, therefore, necessarily contain the germs of a mysterious system equally favored by Plato and by Epicurus; we will leave it for you to meditate upon, enveloped as it is in the veil which enshrouds Egyptian statues.

But the greatest mistake that a man commits is to believe that love can belong only to those fugitive moments which, according to the magnificent expression of Bossuet, are like to the nails scattered over a wall:  to the eye they appear numerous; but when they are collected they make but a handful.