The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read online

  Ceteris paribus represents a far more distant pipe dream in trying to understand two different contexts in the developing history of a profession—for we cannot now manipulate a situation of our own design, but must study past circumstances in complex cultures not subject to regulation by our experimental ideals at all. But any constancy between the two contexts increases our hope of illustrating and understanding their variations in the following special way: if we examine the different treatment of the same object in two cultures, worlds apart, then at least we can attribute the observed variation to cultural distinctions, for the objects treated do not vary.

  The effectively identical Lügensteine of early-eighteenth-century Würzburg and modern Marrakech embody such an interesting difference in proposed meaning and effective treatment by two cultures—and I am not sure that we should be happy about the contrast of then and now. But we must first correct the legend of Beringer and the original Lügensteine if we wish to grasp the essential difference.

  As so often happens when canonical legends arise to impart moral lessons to later generations, the standard tale distorts nearly every important detail of Beringer’s sad story. (I obtained my information primarily from an excellent book published in 1963 by Melvin E. Jahn and Daniel J. Woolf, The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, University of California Press. Jahn and Woolf provide a complete translation of Beringer’s volume, along with extensive commentary about the paleontology of Beringer’s time. I used original sources from my own library for all quotations not from Beringer in this essay.)

  Note the exuberance and (by modern standards) whimsical nature of Beringer’s fake fossils from 1726.

  First of all, on personal issues not directly relevant to the theme of this essay, Beringer wasn’t tricked by a harmless student prank but rather purposely defrauded by two colleagues who hated his dismissive pomposity and wished to bring him down. These colleagues—J. Ignatz Roderick, professor of geography and algebra at the University of Würzburg, and Georg von Eckhart, librarian to the court and the university—“commissioned” the fake fossils (or, in Roderick’s case, probably did much of the carving himself), and then hired a seventeen-year-old boy, Christian Zänger (who may also have helped with the carving), to plant them on the mountain. Zänger, a double agent of sorts, was then hired by Beringer (along with two other boys, both apparently innocent of the fraud) to excavate and collect the stones.

  This information for revising the canonical tale lay hidden for two hundred years in the incomplete and somewhat contradictory records of hearings held in April 1726 before the Würzburg cathedral chapter and the city hall of Eivelstadt (the site of Beringer’s mountain just outside Würzburg). The German scholar Heinrich Kirchner discovered these documents in 1934 in the town archives of Würzburg. These hearings focus on testimony of the three boys. Zänger, the “double agent,” states that Roderick had devised the scheme because 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 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 spare any 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 c
hange, 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 conjecture that 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 centrality and excitement of these debates and to understand the Lügensteine as legitimately puzzling.

  I do not, however, wish to absolve Beringer of all blame under an indefensibly pluralistic doctrine that all plausible explanations of past times may claim the same weight of judicious argument. The Lügensteine may not have been absurd, but Beringer had also encountered enough clues to uncover the hoax and avoid embarrassment. However, for several reasons involving flaws in character and passable intelligence short of true brilliance, Beringer forged on, finally trumping his judgment by his desire to be recognized and honored for a great discovery that had consumed so much of his time and expense. How could he relinquish the fame he could almost taste in writing:

  Behold these tablets, which I was inspired to edit, not only by my tireless zeal for public service, and by your wishes and those of my many friends, and by my strong filial love for Franconia, to which, from these figured fruits of this previously obscure mountain, no less glory will accrue than from the delicious wines of its vine-covered hills.

  I am no fan of Dr. Beringer. He strikes me, first of all, as an insufferable pedant—so I can understand his colleagues’ frustration, while not condoning their solutions. (I pride myself on always quoting from original sources, and I do own a copy of Beringer’s treatise. I am no Latin scholar, but I can read and translate most works in this universal scientific language of Beringer’s time. But I cannot make head or tail of the convoluted phrasings, the invented words, the absurdly twisted sentences of Beringer’s prose, and I have had to rely on Jahn and Woolf’s translation previously cited.)

  Moreover, Beringer saw and reported more than enough evidence to uncover the hoax, had he been inclined to greater judiciousness. He noted that his Lügensteine bore no relationship to any other objects known to the burgeoning science of paleontology, not even to the numerous “real” fossils also found on his mountain. But instead of alerting him to possible fraud, these differences only fueled Beringer’s hopes for fame. He made many observations that should have clued him in (even by standards of his own time) to the artificial carving of his fossils: why were they nearly always complete, and not usually fragmentary like most other finds; why did each object seem to fit so snugly and firmly on the enclosing rock; why did only the top sides protrude, while the lower parts merged with the underlying rock; why had letters and sunbeams not been found before; why did nearly all fossils appear in the same orientation, splayed out and viewed from the top, never from the side or bottom? Beringer’s own words almost shout out the obvious and correct conclusion that he couldn’t abide or even discern: “The 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.”

  Beringer’s arrogance brought him down in a much more direct manner as well. When Eckhart and Roderick learned that Beringer planned to publish his work, they realized that they had gone too far and became frightened. They tried to warn Beringer, by hints at first but later quite directly as their anxiety increased. Roderick even delivered some stones to Beringer and later showed his rival how they had been carved—hoping that Beringer would then draw an obvious inference about the rest of his identical collection.

  Beringer, however, was now committed and would not be derailed. He replied with the argument of all true believers, the unshakable faith that resists all reason and evidence: yes, you have proven that these psychics are frauds, but my psychics are the real McCoy, and I must defend them even more strongly now that you have heaped unfair calumnies upon the entire enterprise. Beringer never mentions Eckhart and Roderick by name (so their unveiling awaited the 1934 discovery in the Würzburg town archives), but he had been forewarned of their activities. Beringer wrote in chapter 12 of his book:

  Then, when I had all but completed my work, I caught the rumor circulating throughout the city … that every one of these stones … was recently sculpted by hand, made to look as though at different periods they had been resurrected from a very old burial, and sold to me as to one indifferent to fraud and caught up in the blind greed of curiosity.

  Beringer then tells the tale of Roderick’s warning but excoriates his rival as an oafish modern caricature of Praxiteles (the preeminent Greek sculptor), out to discredit a great discovery by artificial mimicry:

  Our Praxiteles has issued, in an arrogant letter, a declaration of war. He has threatened to write a small treatise exposing my stones as supposititious [sic]—I should say, his stones, fashioned and fraudulently made by his hand. Thus does this man, virtually unknown among men of letters, still but a novice in the sciences, make a bid for the dawn of his fame in a shameful calumny and imposture.

  If only Beringer had realized how truly and comprehensively he had spoken about “a shameful calumny and imposture.” But Roderick succeeded because he had made his carvings sufficiently plausible to inspire belief by early-eighteenth-century standards. The undoing of all protagonists then followed because Beringer, in his overweening and stubborn arrogance, simply could not quench his ambition once a clever and plausible hoax had unleashed his ardor and vanity.

  In summary, the Lügensteine of Würzburg played a notable role in the most important debate ever pursued in paleontology—a struggle that lasted for centuries and that placed the nature of reality itself up for grabs. By Beringer’s time, this debate had largely been settled in favor of the organic nature of fossils, and this resolution would have occurred even if Beringer had never been born and the Lügensteine never carved. Beringer may have been a vain and arrogant man of limited talent, working in an academic backwater of his day, but at least he struggled with grand issues—and he fell because his hoaxers understood the great stakes and fashioned frauds that could be viewed as cleverly relevant to this intellectual battle, however preposterous they appear to us today with our additional knowledge and radically altered theories about the nature of reality and causation.

  (One often needs a proper theory to set a context for the exposure of fraud. Piltdown Man fooled some of the world’s best scientists for
generations. I will never forget what W E. le Gros Clark, one of the three scientists who exposed the fraud in the early 1950s, said to me when I asked him why the hoax had stood for forty years. Even an amateur in vertebrate anatomy—as this snail man can attest from personal experience—now has no trouble seeing the Piltdown bones for what they are. The staining is so crude, and the recent file marks on the orangutan teeth in the lower jaw so obvious—yet so necessary to make them look human in the forgers’ plan, for the cusps of ape and human teeth differ so greatly. Le Gros Clark said to me: “One needed to approach the bones with the hypothesis of fraud already in mind. In such a context, the fakery immediately became obvious.”)

  The Lügensteine of Marrakech are, by contrast—and I don’t know how else to say this—merely ludicrous and preposterous. No excuse save ignorance—and I do, of course, recognize the continued prevalence of this all-too-human trait—could possibly inspire a belief that the plaster blobs atop the Moroccan stones might be true fossils, the remains of ancient organisms. Beringer was grandly tricked in the pursuit of great truths, however inadequate his own skills. We are merely hoodwinked for a few dollars that mean little to most tourists but may make or break the lives of local carvers. Caveat emptor.