Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [29]
Then, with the excitement of a child seeing for the first time a tiny world enlarged to the gigantic, Agassiz described the structure of the paper like some foreign landscape of dips and hills, transversed by rivers of ink frozen in time:
The highest powers used disclosed clearly the texture of the paper, and the manner in which the materials used for writing—the material—is distributed in its structure. With such a power, it appears that the paper consists of fibers felted together, intercrossing each other in every direction, not unlike a pile of chips, pressed together. It is easy to trace with the microscope the fibers that lie at the surface, and distinguish these with those at successive greater depths. Into this felt the ink has penetrated, and penetrated unevenly, the thicker parts of the ink being accumulated along the more superficial fibers of the felt, the more fluid part penetrating deeper, and here and there both merging together.
The ink, Agassiz said, lay in varying thickness on the paper; “under the microscope, the thicker clots of ink resembled mud, caught up under brush on a riverbank, after a spring freshet.” All of this indicated to Agassiz that the signatures had been composed in a natural hand. With regard to pencil marks, he said, his examination “did not disclose the slightest indication of materials foreign to the ink as seen in any part of the signature. Pencil not being a fluid substance, if used in this case, would have left its mark on the superficial fibers of the paper, and remained there, while, in every part of the letters which look lighter than the others, the lighter color is deeper in the substance of the paper, and the accuracy with which the focus of the microscope may be made to bear in succession from the surface deeper, leaves no doubt upon this point.” He added, “I have carefully compared the three signatures, besides examining them singly, and in not one of them can I detect indications of the use of two kinds of materials tracing the letters.”
Three weeks after Agassiz’s testimony, Bartlett delivered the signatures for examination to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous author and Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School. Trained in both law and medicine, Holmes was at fifty-seven one of the most revered figures in Boston, indeed, in the country, a true Renaissance figure. He was equally at home writing light verse, psychological novels, or disquisitions on “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” He was a founder of and one of the most prolific contributors to the Atlantic Monthly. As a twenty-one-year-old law student at Harvard, he had written the poem “Old Ironsides”—which was credited with saving the historic ship Constitution and remains a staple in anthologies of nineteenth-century poetry. But it was his expertise with a microscope that attracted the attention of Hetty’s lawyers.
“With the mechanical arrangements of the microscope, not the optical, I have made certain improvements, I think,” Holmes modestly told a questioner the morning after his examination of the signatures. Holmes had examined the paper using simple and compound microscopes, by both daylight and gaslight. His analysis essentially corroborated that of Agassiz. “I found nothing to show that either was traced,” Holmes declared.
But it would not be sufficient simply to establish the absence of pencil marks. Hetty’s lawyers had to overcome the improbability of Sylvia’s signature appearing almost identical on three separate documents, when even the most consistent penmanship is likely to produce slight variations from signature to signature. With or without the aid of pencils, this stretched credulity to the