Market Will Decide if Young Lincoln is a Fake

Ever since the small, leather-encased oval daguerreotype of someone who looks like a young Abraham Lincoln surfaced a few years ago, experts have been arguing about it. If the picture, made around 1843, is of the 16th President, it would be Lincoln's first likeness, predating a daguerreotype in the Library of Congress that was made between 1846 and 1849. It would be a major historical discovery.

The image in question, known as the Hay Wadsworth daguerreotype, has thus faced all kinds of scrutiny: by a forensic anthropologist, a criminal identification specialist, a photographer who ''aged'' the image by computer and two medical experts who analyzed the vein pattern in the subject's hand. Most of them think it is Lincoln.

But skeptics persist, led by the doubter-in-chief, Lloyd Ostendorf, 77, of Akron, Ohio, the surviving co-author of Lincoln in Photographs (Morningside Press, 1985). ''I have no questions about what that is, and it's not Lincoln,'' he said, reeling off a dozen physical characteristics, from the big, sharp nose to the too-small ears, that do not match Lincoln's.

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