The Lying Stones of Marrakech

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Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Würzburg. These hearings focus on testimony of the three boys. Zänger, the “double agent,” states that Roderick had devised the schemebecause he “wished to accuse Dr. Beringer … because Beringer was so arrogant and despised them all.” I was also impressed by the testimony of the two brothers hired by Beringer. Their innocence seems clear in the wonderfully ingenuous statement of Nicklaus Hahn that if he and his brother “could make such stones, they wouldn’t be mere diggers.”
    The canonical tale may require Beringer’s ruin to convey a desired moral, but the facts argue differently. I do not doubt that the doctor was painfully embarrassed, even mortified, by his exposed gullibility; but he evidently recovered, kept his job and titles, lived for another fourteen years, and published several more books (including, though probably not by his design or will, a posthumous second edition of his Würzburg Lithography! ). Eckhart and Roderick, on the other hand, fell into well-earned disgrace. Eckhart died soon thereafter, and Roderick, having left Würzburg (voluntarily or not, we do not know), then wrote a humbling letter to the prince-bishop begging permission to return—which his grace allowed after due rebuke for Roderick’s past deeds—and to regain access to the library and archives so that he could write a proper obituary for his deceased friend Eckhart.
    But on the far more important intellectual theme of Beringer’s significance in the history of paleontology, a different kind of correction inverts the conventional story in a particularly meaningful way. The usual cardboard tale of progressive science triumphant over past ignorance requires that benighted “bad guys,” who upheld the old ways of theological superstition against objective evidence of observational science, be branded as both foolish and stubbornly unwilling to face nature’s factuality. Since Beringer falls into this category of old and bad, we want to see him as hopelessly duped by preposterous fakes that any good observer should have recognized—hence the emphasis, in the canonical story, on Beringer’s mortification and on the ridiculous character of the Lügensteine themselves.
    The Würzburg carvings are, of course, absurd by modern definitions and understanding of fossils. We know that spiders’ webs and lizards’ eyes—not to mention solar rays and the Hebrew name of God—cannot fossilize, so the Lügensteine can only be human carvings. We laugh at Beringer for not making an identification that seems so obvious to us. But in so doing, we commit the greatest of all historical errors: arrogantly judging our forebears in the light of modern knowledge perforce unavailable to them. Of course the Lügensteine are preposterous, once we recognize fossils as preserved remains of ancient organisms. By this criterion, letters and solar emanations cannot be real fossils, and anyone who unites such objects with plausible images of organisms can only be a fool.
    But when we enter Beringer’s early-eighteenth-century world of geological understanding, his interpretations no longer seem so absurd. First of all, Beringer was puzzled by the unique character of his Lügensteine , and he adopted no dogmatic position about their meaning. He did regard them as natural and not carved (a portentous error, of course), but he demurred on further judgment and repeatedly stated that he had chosen to publish in order to provide information so that others might better debate the nature of fossils—a tactic that scientists supposedly value. We may regard the closing words of his penultimate chapter as a tad grandiose and self-serving, but shall we not praise the sentiment of openness?
    I have willingly submitted my plates to the scrutiny of wise men, desiring to learn their verdict, rather than to proclaim my own in this totally new and much mooted question. I
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