The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [5]
READING BETWEEN THE LINES
The four lines found on almost all hands are the heart line, the head line, the life line, and the fate line.
The heart line lies toward the top of the palm, under the fingers, starting at the outer edge of the palm and extending toward the thumb and fingers. This line is said to indicate both metaphoric and literal matters of the heart, revealing clues about romantic life as well as cardiac health. The deeper the line, the stronger your emotions.
The head line begins at the inner edge of the palm beneath the index finger and extends across toward the palm’s outside edge. The head line is often joined or intertwined with the life line at its start, and the line itself is thought to indicate a person’s intellect and creativity as well as attitude and general approach to life.
The life line starts at the edge of the palm above the thumb, where it is often joined with the head line, and extends in an arc towards the wrist. This line is said to reveal a person’s vitality, health, and general well being. The life line is also said to reflect major life changes, including illness and injury—the one thing it doesn’t indicate, contrary to popular belief, is the length of a person’s life.
A fourth line found on most hands is the fate line, also called the line of destiny. It begins in the middle of the palm near the wrist and extends toward the middle finger. The deeper the line, the more a person’s life is determined by fate. A line with breaks, changes of direction, or chains indicates a personality prone to change due to circumstance beyond a person’s control.
The History of Writing, and Writing in Cursive Italics
THE FIRST writing instrument resembled the first hunting instrument: a sharpened stone. These stones were used to etch pictures on cave walls depicting visual records of daily life. Over time, drawings evolved into symbols that ultimately came to represent words and sentences, and the medium itself shifted from cave walls to clay tablets. Still, it wasn’t until much later that the alphabet emerged to replace pictographs and symbols. Another milestone in the history of writing was the advent of paper in ancient China. The Greek scholar Cadmus, who was the founder of the city of Thebes and proponent of the Phoenician alphabet, was also the purported inventor of the original text message—letters, written by hand, on paper, sent from one person to another.
Some cultures lasted for many years before having a written language. In fact, Vietnamese wasn’t written down until the 1600s. Two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries named Gaspar d’Amiral and Antonio Barboza Romanized the language by developing a writing and spelling system using the Roman alphabet and several signs to represent the tonal accents of Vietnamese speech. This system was further codified in the first comprehensive Vietnamese dictionary (containing over 8,000 words) by Frenchman Alexandre de Rhodes in 1651. This is why its written language uses Roman letters instead of characters like the surrounding Asian countries do.
At first, all letter-based writing systems used only uppercase letters. Once the writing instruments themselves became more refined, lowercase letters became possible. And as writing instruments improved, and the alphabet became more elaborate, handwriting became an issue. Today we have an incredible variety of things to write with—all manner of pens, pencils, markers, crayons—but the writing instrument most used in recent history was the quill pen, made from a bird feather. (Elsewhere we’ve included instructions for