As the stones kept coming in and his collection got larger and stranger (Hebrew letters! Frogs mating! A “ fish-faced bird”!), Beringer didn’t flinch. But was he pompous enough to believe the stones were real?īeringer’s colleagues just wanted to slug him. (Image: University of Heidelberg/CC BY-SA 3.0) So Beringer was insufferable enough to inspire these two colleagues to prank him big time. Christian Zanger, a 17-year-old the duo hired to polish and distribute the stones, later said they went to all this trouble ”because Beringer was so arrogant and despised them all.” Ignatz Roderick and librarian Georg von Eckhart, carving upwards of two thousand stones into flora, fauna, and celestial signs. It was, rather, a hoax of exceptional magnitude-one that involved the perpetrators, Wurzburg University mathematician J. The problem? It wasn’t the kind of discovery Beringer thought it was. Here was Beringer’s opportunity to not only join the fray, but to blow everyone’s minds with his unprecedented discovery. At the time, scholars of oryctics were engaged in a passionate debate about where exactly “figured stones,” or fossils, came from. Over the next few weeks, the his hired hands carted in more and more weirdly-shaped reliefs-stony birds, lizards, spiders, slugs, and even comets. Beringer was excited. (Image: University of Heidelberg/CC BY-SA 3.0) But on May 31, 1725, the boys brought in a truly interesting haul: three stones, one shaped like a gleaming sun, the other two imprinted with worms.Ī set of Beringer’s Stones carved with celestial objects. Most of them were nothing to write home about, worthy of serving as props for brief lectures on at the University or of slotting into his well-stocked cabinet of natural curiosities. He especially enjoyed collecting and poring over oryctics, or “things dug from the earth,” and he had hired some neighborhood boys to bring him interesting chunks of rock from the nearby Mount Eibelstadt. Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer had it all-the dean’s chair at Germany’s Wurzburg University, a sheaf of important medical papers to his name, and the grateful support of powerful patients, including the local Prince-Bishop (who ruled both secular and religious populations).īy 1726, that magnificent name had been dragged through the mud, all because of a bunch of rocks.īeringer was a physician by trade, but his true love was natural history. Engravings of some crabby specimens from Beringer’s figured stone collection, from his 1726 Lithographiæ Wirceburgensis.
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