How to Know People by Their Hands by Josef Ranald

Was this a case of clairvoyance — penetration of the future by some gifted seer whose word was accepted by modern scientists as suffi cient reason to send them voyaging thousands of miles? Not at all. Test tubes and mathematical formulae breed men from Missouri who want to be shown. They would certainly not have accepted the word of inspiration on this subject any more than they would have taken a mad Adventist's forecast of the world's end. Yet they, and millions of others, accepted detailed predictions of the exact path the obscuring Shadow of the moon would take.

So, in other fields of science, has prediction become a matter of course. Chemists will tell you in advance the reaction to be obtained by combining two substances. Physicists will explain how soon and Where a projectile, shot from a certain place, will hit. Engineers will inform you how many revolutions per minute to expect from a wheel as the power applied is increased or decreased.

In less learned circles, everyone is willing to embark on limited predictions about the everyday occurrences of our lives. We take for granted that night will be followed by morning. We assume that when we apply a match to an Open gas jet the gas will ignite. We are not surprised when we drop a pencil to see it fall to the ground.