In the seven-type Victorian system, the Mixed hand was explicitly acknowledged as the most common classification. The system's authors knew that most hands shared features across categories, and rather than forcing every hand into a pure type, they created a Mixed category that they then read by identifying the dominant combination. A hand that was mostly Square with Spatulate elements was read as predominantly Square.
In the four-element system, the Earth hand (square palm, short fingers) is generally considered the most common pure type, reflecting the statistical reality that most humans have relatively compact hands — the agricultural, industrial, and physical-labour baseline from which the other types diverge. Long-palmed fire hands are somewhat common; the rarer types (Water, and in the seven-type system, Psychic) represent genuine morphological outliers.
The practical implication is that most palmistry readings are readings of Mixed types, which requires the reader to prioritise features rather than slot the hand into a predetermined box.
