You’re Having A Laugh – Part Twenty Three
Johann Beringer and the lying stones, 1725
An unusual and obscure word I dug up the other day was oryctics. It was the name given to the study of fossils in the eighteenth century, what we would now call paleontology. Although in those days there was little understanding of how fossils were created, let alone what it meant to the dating of the Earth and the Creation story, there was an interest in these objects amongst the scientific community.
The Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the German University of Würzburg, Johann Beringer, was one such enthusiast. He had, by the standards of the day, an impressive collection and was always on the look-out for specimens. He probably could not believe his luck when some boys knocked on his door in 1725 and presented him with three pieces of limestone. On one of the stones, in three-dimensional relief, was an image of the sun and on the other two representations of worms. The images fitted the stones perfectly and were not only complete but in surprisingly good condition for something that had been buried for centuries underground.
Within months the boys had brought him some two thousand or so of these artefacts, some of which bore the images of plants, birds, snails, celestial objects and even letters in Hebrew script. Beringer thought that what he had was so astonishing that the discovery deserved a wider audience and so, in the following year, he published a treatise on the subject, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis. This, in a way, proved to be his undoing.
The problem was that to anyone else other than Beringer these stones looked distinctly odd and somewhat suspect. The plants and animals depicted are complete. There is no room for doubt as to what each is and the specimens of plants are complete with roots, stems, leaves and flowers. Each of the specimens are positioned in such a way as to display their specific anatomical features to the best advantage and there is no sign of the pressure and distortion you may have expected from fossils removed from the ground. Careful examination also revealed evidence of chisel marks.
Even Beringer expressed some doubts about their provenance in a throw-away remark in his book; ““he figures expressed on these stones, especially those of insects, are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor.” Despite this momentary doubt, which he dismissed on the grounds that a modern hoaxer would not have spent so much time on such an elaborate hoax and for what end and, he argued, even more likely to have been due to the hand of God, Beringer pressed ahead and published his book.
The scales fell off Beringer’s eyes, the story goes, when on the day that his treatise was rolling off the printing presses, the boys presented him with a stone bearing his name. In a panic and fearing academic ruin, as well he might, Beringer tried to stop the presses but it was too late. All he could do was buy up as many of the books as he could and destroy them. A first edition, bizarrely a second edition was printed in 1767, is hard to come by.
Beringer suspected that the perpetrators of the hoax were two of his erstwhile colleagues, Ignatz Roderick, Professor of Geography, Algebra and Analysis, and Georg van Eckhart, Privy Councillor and Librarian, and brought criminal charges against them. The case came to court on April 13, 1726 and such was the furore that Roderick was forced to flee Würzburg under a cloud. Quite why they were motivated to perpetrate such an involved hoax is unclear although records from the trial suggest that they hated Beringer because “he was so arrogant and despised them all”.
To this day in Germany Beringer is regarded as the epitome of credulity and a cautionary tale for overbearing academics. Some of the stones, known as lying stones or Lügensteine can be seen in Oxford University Museum and Teylors Museum in Haarlem in the Netherlands.
If you liked this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
