Oliver Wendell Holmes
n.d.
Photomicrograph of "The Declaration of Independence"
Google Books
Oliver Wendell Holmes, "VII. Mechanism in Thought and Morals" IN Pages from an Old Volume of Life - A Collection of Essays 1857-1881, (Boston: Hoghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883), p.298.
 
I have a glass slide on which is a minute photographic picture, which is exactly covered when the head of a small pin is laid upon it. In that little speck are clearly to be seen, by a proper magnifying power, the following objects: the Declaration of Independence, with easily-recognized facsimile autographs of all the signers; the arms of all the original thirteen States ; the Capitol at Washington; and very good portraits of all the Presidents of the United States from Washington to Polk. These objects are all distinguishable as a group with a power of fifty diameters: with a power of three hundred, any one of them becomes a sizable picture. You may see, if you will, the majesty of Washington on his noble features, or the will of Jackson in those hard lines of the long face, crowned with that bristling head of hair in a perpetual state of electrical divergence and centrifugal self-assertion. Remember that each of these faces is the record of a life.
 
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