This lurid face once emitted glares and thunderous sounds. Between 1808 and 1900 it was the body of the theologian Edwards Amasa Park, and it influenced American literature at least once: certainly when Emily Dickinson recorded her awed reaction to one of his sermons in a letter to her brother (JL142, November 21, 1853), and later, perhaps, in the form of a poem:

But its physical record is a history of extinction. See how much of the silver-mercury amalgam has been damaged and how little remains. To construct even this partial objet d’art cost me a debt of indeterminable amount to the artifact-generating computer technique called artificial intelligence. With black and white artificially replacing daguerreotype silver, see:

No, it isn’t visible to you now; not accurately, not in any way that would have been received with assent by anyone sitting in a hardwood New England pew in 1853. The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and in due time Emily Dickinson wrote ruefully about it. You see your images now in an evolved way, through a color filter.

So fall into line. You have no choice but to be received into the epoch of tangerine.

It’s in your constitution now.

For detail about Dickinson and Park, see Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001), pp. 310-313.