Horns of Honor by Fredrick Thomas Elworthy

Author:Fredrick Thomas Elworthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609258641
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
Published: 2017-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER III.

THE HAND

THE PRESENT WRITER HAS already dealt at some length with this member, well named by Aristotle “the tool of tools.” Hitherto he has, however, but approached the fringe of the subject, and produced the merest sample of the facts concerning it.

To touch and to handle, though undoubtedly its most important functions, are, even amongst us matter-of-fact English people, but a small part of the uses for which our hands come into practice.

Putting aside all notice of palmistry and mesmerism into which the hand so largely enters, and leaving those departments to the experts who make a special business of such quasi-sciences, there is an abundant field for observation even without going beyond our own four seas; whilst among more emotional people than ourselves the hands play a part which, though often referred to, has in only one work with which we are acquainted been treated in anything approaching a systematic manner.48 Much use has been made of this book, but chiefly in connection with that branch of manual gesture so common among the Italians, which expresses their belief in, and their actions to ward off, the effects of jettatura or malocchio.49

Elsewhere, we have given an elaborate system of manual numeration, said by the Abate Requeno to have been obtained by the Romans from the Greeks, by which any number, up to hundreds of thousands, could be signalled by the hands alone.

Another system, similar in kind but very different in the manual signs, is given, also with full illustrations, by Zornius, Bibliotheca Antiquaria, vol. ii. p. 793.

Among ourselves even, gesticulation, though restrained as a rule, and moderate by comparison, is of course common enough, whether we study the actions of the real orator, the cushion-thumping preacher, or the hand-washing-with-impalpable-water-and-invisible-soap of the obsequious shopman. The devotional attitude of the hands is just as well understood by us English of to-day as it was by the Minutoli of Naples in the thirteenth century, shown in Fig. 23, thus proving that six hundred years of time and over a thousand miles of space, have had no effect in even modifying what seems to be, by the common consent of mankind, the most appropriate manual gesture with which to accompany his devotions.

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