The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read Online Free PDF

address myself to scholars, hoping to be instructed by their most learned responses…. It is my fervent expectation that illustrious lithographers will shed light upon this dispute which is as obscure as it is unusual. I shall add thereto my own humble torch, nor shall I spareany effort to reveal and declare whatever future yields may rise from the Würzburg field under the continuous labors of my workers, and whatever opinion my mind may embrace.

    Another comparison between German fake fossils of 1726 and modern Moroccan fabrications .
    More importantly, Beringer’s hoaxers had not crafted preposterous objects but had cleverly contrived—for their purposes, remember, were venomous, not humorous—a fraud that might fool a man of decent will and reasonable intelligence by standards of interpretation then current. Beringer wrote his treatise at the tail end of a debate that had engulfed seventeenth-century science and had not yet been fully resolved: what did fossils represent, and what did they teach us about the age of the earth, the nature of our planet’s history, and the meaning and definition of life?
    Beringer regarded the Lügensteine as “natural” but not necessarily as organic in origin. In the great debate that he knew and documented so well, many scientists viewed fossils as inorganic products of the mineral realm that somehow mimicked the forms of organisms but might also take the shapes of other objects, including planets and letters. Therefore, in Beringer’s world, the Lügensteine could not be dismissed as preposterous prima facie. This debate could not have engaged broader or more crucial issues for the developing sciences of geology and biology—for if fossils represent the remains of organisms, then the earth must be ancient, life must enjoy a long history of consistent change, and rocks must form from the deposition and hardening of sediments. But if fossils can originate as inorganic results of a “plastic power” in the mineral kingdom (that can fashion other interesting shapes like crystals, stalactites, and banded agates in different circumstances), then the earth may be young and virtually unchanged (except for the ravages of Noah’s flood), while rocks, with their enclosed fossils, may be products of the original creation, not historical results of altered sediments.
    If pictures of planets and Hebrew letters could be “fossils” made in the same way as apparent organisms, then the inorganic theory gains strong support— for a fossilized aleph or moonbeam could not be construed as a natural object deposited in a streambed and then fossilized when the surrounding sediment became buried and petrified. The inorganic theory had been fading rapidly in Beringer’s time, while the organic alternative gained continually in support. But the inorganic view remained plausible, and the Lügensteine therefore become clever and diabolical, not preposterous and comical.
    In Beringer’s day, many scientists believed that simple organisms arose continually by spontaneous generation. If a polyp can originate by the influence of sunshine upon waters, or a maggot by heat upon decaying flesh, why not conjecturethat simple images of objects might form upon rocks by natural interactions of light or heat upon the inherent “lapidifying forces” of the mineral kingdom? Consider, moreover, how puzzling the image of a fish inside a rock must have appeared to people who viewed these rocks as products of an original creation, not as historical outcomes of sedimentation. How could an organism get inside; and how could fossils be organisms if they frequently occur petrified, or made of the same stone as their surroundings? We now have simple and “obvious” answers to these questions, but Beringer and his colleagues still struggled—and any sympathetic understanding of early-eighteenth-century contexts should help us to grasp the