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From 1830 to 1850, Philadelphia's scientific, artistic, and literary communities experienced unprecedented synergy. Scientific societies founded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, such as the American Philosophical Society, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Franklin Institute, reached a stage of broad expansion. Medical science and education ballooned, and magazines, newspapers, and publishers were proliferating. The circle of the educated elite in Philadelphia was large enough to exhibit wide professional diversity, yet small enough to allow frequent associations among its members, whether scientists, artists, or both. We propose that a daguerreotype that has appeared since 1937 in several articles, often without attribution, was taken by Paul Beck Goddard in the winter of 1842-43 in the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia's recently constructed building at the …