The Lying Stones of Marrakech (5 page)

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
.

In contrasting the conflicting meanings of these identical fakes in such radically different historical contexts, I can only recall Karl Marx's famous opening line to
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
, his incisive essay on the rise to power of the vain and cynical Napoleon III after the revolution of 1848, in contrast with the elevated hopes and disappointments inspired by the original Napoleon. (The French revolutionary calendar had renamed the months and started time again at the establishment of the Republic. In this system, Napoleon's coup d'état occurred on the eighteenth of Brumaire, a foggy month in a renamed autumn, of year VIII—or November 9, 1799. Marx, now justly out of fashion for horrors later committed in his name, remains a brilliant analyst of historical patterns.) Marx opened his polemical treatise by noting that all great events in history occur twice—the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce.

Beringer was a pompous ass, and his florid and convoluted phrases represent a caricature of true scholarship. Stall, he fell in the course of a great debate, using his limited talents to defend an inquiry that he loved and that even more pompous fools of his time despised—those who argued that refined people wouldn't dirty their hands in the muck of mountains but would solve the world's pressing issues under their wigs in their drawing rooms. Beringer characterized this opposition from the pseudo-elegant glitterati of his day:

They pursue [paleontology] with an especially censorious rod, and condemn it to rejection from the world of erudition as one of the wanton futilities of intellectual idlers. To what purpose, they ask, do we stare fixedly with eye and mind at small stones and figured rocks, at little images of animals or plants, the rubbish of mountain and stream, found by chance amid the muck and sand of land and sea?

He then defended his profession with the greatest of geological metaphors:

any [paleontologist], like David of old, would be able with one flawless stone picked from the bosom of Nature, to prostrate, by one blow
on the forehead, the gigantic mass of objections and satires and to vindicate the honor of this sublime science from all its calumniators.

Beringer, to his misfortune and largely as a result of his own limitations, did not pick a “flawless stone,” but he properly defended the importance of paleontology and of empirical science in general. As a final irony, Beringer could not have been more wrong about the
Lügensteine
, but he couldn't have been more right about the power of paleontology. Science has so revolutionized our view of reality since 1726 that we, in our current style of arrogance, can only regard the Würzburg
Lügensteine
as preposterous, because we unfairly impose our modern context and fail to understand Beringer's world, including the deep issues that made his hoaxing a tragedy rather than a farce.

Our current reality features an unslayable Goliath of commercialism, and modern scientific Davids must make an honorable peace, for a slingshot cannot win this battle. I may be terribly old-fashioned (shades, I hope not, of poor Beringer)—but I continue to believe that such honor can only be sought in separation and mutual respect. Opportunities for increasing fusion with the world of commerce surround us with almost overwhelming temptation, for the immediate and palpable “rewards” are so great. So scientists go to work for competing pharmaceutical or computer companies, make monumental salaries, but cannot choose their topics of research or publish their work. And museums expand their gift shops to the size of their neglected exhibit halls, and purvey their dinosaurs largely for dollars in the form of images on coffee mugs and T-shirts, or by special exhibits, at fancy prices, of robotic models, built by commercial companies, hired for the show, and featuring, as their come-on, the very properties—mostly hideous growls and lurid colors—that leave no evidence in the fossil record and therefore remain a matter of pure conjecture to science.

I am relieved that Sue the
Tyrannosaurus
, sold at auction by Sotheby's for more than 8 million dollars, will go to Chicago's Field Museum and not to the anonymity of some corporate boardroom, to stand (perhaps) next to a phony Van Gogh. But I am not happy that no natural history museum in the world can pony up the funds for such a purpose—and that McDonald's had to provide the cash. McDonald's is not, after all, an eleemosynary institution, and they will legitimately want their piece for their price. Will it be the Happy Meal Hall of Paleontology at the Field Museum? (Will we ever again be able to view a public object with civic dignity, unencumbered by commercial messages? Must city buses be fully painted as movable ads, lampposts smothered, taxis festooned, even seats in concert halls sold one by one to donors and embellished in perpetuity with their names on silver plaques?) Or will we soon see Sue the
Robotic Tyrannosaur—the purchase of the name rather than the thing, for Sue's actual skeleton cannot improve the colors or sounds of the robots, and her value, in this context, lies only in the recognition of her name (and the memory of the dollars she attracted), not in her truly immense scientific worth.

I am neither an idealist nor a Luddite in this matter. I just feel that the world of commerce and the world of intellect, by their intrinsic natures, must pursue different values and priorities—while the commercial world looms so much larger than our domain that we can only be engulfed and destroyed if we make a devil's bargain of fusion for short-term gain. The worth of fossils simply cannot be measured in dollars. But the
Lügensteine
of Marrakech can only be assessed in this purely symbolic way—for the Moroccan fakes have no intellectual value and can bring only what the traffic (and human gullibility) will bear. We cannot possibly improve upon Shakespeare's famous words for this sorry situation—and this ray of hope for the honor and differences of intellect over cash:

Who steals my purse steals trash …
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed
.

But we must also remember that these words are spoken by the villainous Iago, who will soon make Othello a victim, by exploiting the Moor's own intemperance, of the most poignant and tragic deception in all our literature. Any modern intellectual, to avoid Beringer's sad fate, must hold on to the dream—while keeping a cold eye on immediate realities. Follow your bliss, but remember that handkerchiefs can be planted for evil ends and fossils carved for ready cash.

I. G
ALILEO
G
ALILEI AND THE
T
HREE
G
LOBES OF
S
ATURN

I
N
1603,
FEDERICO CESI, THE DUKE OF ACQUASPARTA,
founded an organization that grew from uncertain beginnings to become the first scientific society in modern European history. Cesi (1585–1630), a teenaged nobleman, invited three slightly older friends (all in their mid-twenties) to establish the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes), dedicated to scientific investigation (“reading this great, true, and universal book of the world,” to cite Cesi's own words), and named for a sleek and wily carnivore, then still living in the forests of Italy and renowned in song and story for unparalleled sight among mammals.

The legend of the sharp-eyed lynx had arisen in ancient times and persisted to Cesi's day. Pliny's canonical compendium of
natural history had called the lynx “the most clear sighted of all quadrupeds.” Plutarch had embellished the legend by speaking of “the lynx, who can penetrate through trees and rocks with its sharp sight.” And Galen, ever the comparative anatomist, had written: “We would seem absurdly weak in our powers of vision if we compared our sight to the acuity of the lynx or the eagle.” (I have translated these aphorisms directly from Conrad Gesner's 1551 compendium on mammals, the standard source for such information in Cesi's day.)

The official emblem of Europe's first scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes), founded in 1603 and including Galileo as an early member
.

Still, despite Cesi's ambitious names and aims, the academy of four young men faltered at first. Cesi's father made a vigorous attempt to stop his son's foolishness, and the four Lynxes all dispersed to their native cities, keeping their organization alive only by the uncertain media of post and messages. But Cesi persevered and triumphed (for a time), thanks to several skills and circumstances. He acquired more power and prestige, both by growing up and by inheriting substantial wealth. Most importantly, he became a consummate diplomat and facilitator within the maximally suspicious and labyrinthine world of civil and ecclesiastical politics in Rome during the Counter-Reformation. The Lynxes flourished largely because Cesi managed to keep the suspicions of popes and cardinals at bay, while science prepared to fracture old views of the cosmos, and to develop radically new theories about the nature of matter and causation.