Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [28]
It took the defense no time at all to label the document a fake. But what occupied a lions share of the case was not the document itself, but Aunt Sylvia’s signature at the bottom. Nobody questioned the authenticity of Sylvia’s signature on the 1862 will—which, after all, had been made in the presence of three witnesses. But Hetty was the only witness as Sylvia supposedly signed two copies of the second page, one for each of them to keep. The signatures on all three items looked almost exactly alike, indicating that someone had copied or traced the two “second page” signatures from the signature on the will. Was Hetty Robinson a forger?
Rarely had such a collection of scientific celebrities been assembled for one case. In their zeal to top one another, both sides sought the greatest names they could find for their professional opinions—among them Louis Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Peirce, and John Quincy Adams, grandson and namesake of the sixth president of the United States. Their depositions were taken separately over several months, mostly in the Boston office of Special Examiner Francis W. Palfrey. But the collective star power, combined with the lure of the wealth involved, made the case one of the most watched civil cases of the century.
Of all the expert witnesses called, Louis Agassiz, the eminent Harvard naturalist, seemed to take the greatest pleasure in the assignment. The Swiss-born Agassiz had published groundbreaking works on zoology and geology in Europe, including a study of glaciers that first shed light on the existence of the Ice Age. His work had made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1846 he had come to America to lecture and study. By 1848 he was in place as chairman of the Department of Natural History at Harvard, where he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was at the height of his fame, and just a month shy of his sixtieth birthday, when Sidney Bartlett, lead council for Hetty’s side, delivered Sylvia’s signatures to Agassiz at his office at the museum on a spring day in 1867. Agassiz set about examining them under a microscope. He was delighted with the opportunity to demonstrate his skills.
Agassiz basked in his reputation as a scientific genius. Testifying for Hetty’s side, Agassiz said, “I have been devoting my whole life to the study of natural history. I began as a child, and have pursued it to this day; I am studying now; I am a student; that pursuit involves the use of the microscope very extensively.” Asked if he would consider himself an expert with a microscope, Agassiz replied, dryly, in his heavily accented English, “He that has had long training is a master, if he brings the proper application, proper care, to his work.”
In this case, Agassiz had been asked specifically to check for signs of pencil marks underneath the ink in the two signatures in question. Pencil, of course, would be a dead giveaway that the signatures were traced first.
Agassiz testified:
I have examined these papers very carefully, in the way in which I generally examine objects submitted to various magnifying powers. First, with my naked eye, and with spectacles, and with simple lenses of various powers from one half to two diameters. Such a preliminary examination I always make, in order to become acquainted with the object in its totality, when the low power permits to see the whole object at one time, and