Beringer’s Lying Stones — carved fakes planted to humble a proud professor

In 1726, at the University of Würzburg in Franconia, the physician and professor Johann Bartholomäus Adam Beringer published a lavish book illustrating some two hundred remarkable “fossils” he believed had been dug from a hillside called Mount Eibelstadt. The stones showed lizards, frogs, spiders in their webs, birds, comets, the sun and moon, and even Hebrew letters spelling the name of God. None of it was real. The objects were soft limestone carved by hand and planted for Beringer to find — a hoax aimed squarely at a man his colleagues judged insufferably arrogant. The volume, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, is one of the most famous self-inflicted disasters in the history of science.

The deception was the work of two university colleagues: Johann Ignatz Roderick, a professor of geography and mathematics, and Johann Georg von Eckhart, the court librarian and privy councillor. By their own later admission and the surviving court record, they resented Beringer’s conceit and contrived to ruin it by feeding him exactly the marvels his theories craved. Their instrument was one of Beringer’s own diggers, the seventeen-year-old Christian Zänger, who planted the carved stones where the professor and his other two boys — the brothers Niklaus and Valentin Hehn — would unearth them.

According to the durable tradition, the hoax undid itself when stones began to appear bearing Beringer’s own name, a flourish too pointed to be nature’s. Realizing he had been deceived, Beringer took the matter to law. The Würzburg records show a hearing before the Cathedral Chapter on 13 April 1726 and municipal proceedings on 15 April and 11 June 1726, in which the conspirators were examined. The fraud destroyed the careers of its perpetrators — Roderick left Würzburg and Eckhart his standing — but it did not spare its victim, whose name has been attached ever since to credulous, wishful science.

What makes the case endure is not the crudeness of the carvings but the sophistication of the self-deception. Beringer was not stupid; he was a learned man whose theoretical commitments and vanity led him to read manufactured nonsense as evidence for a cherished idea — that some fossils were not the remains of organisms at all but figures impressed in stone by a “formative force” or the hand of God. The Lying Stones, the Lügensteine, remain the textbook warning that a clever mind defending a beloved hypothesis can be the easiest of all to fool. Beringer reportedly tried to buy back every copy of his book; he died about a decade later, in 1738.

The Feejee Mermaid — a monkey sewn to a fish, sold as a marvel

In the summer of 1842, in New York City, the showman P.T. Barnum exhibited what he advertised as a preserved mermaid taken from the waters near the Feejee (Fiji) Islands. It was no such thing. The object was a manufactured specimen — the desiccated head and torso of a monkey stitched to the dried tail of a fish — most likely made by craftsmen in the East Indies and acquired decades earlier by a Western sailor. Barnum knew it was false; before he displayed it he had consulted a naturalist who told him plainly that it was a fabrication. He exhibited it anyway, having engineered the public into demanding to see it.

What makes the Feejee Mermaid a landmark is not the crude object but the campaign Barnum built around it. He had leased the curiosity from the Boston showman Moses Kimball, and rather than simply put it on display, he constructed a fictional authority to vouch for it. An associate, Levi Lyman, was installed in a New York hotel as “Dr. J. Griffin,” a supposed naturalist of the (entirely invented) “British Lyceum of Natural History,” carrying the mermaid as a scientific prize. Barnum then planted letters in New York newspapers, ostensibly mailed from Alabama and South Carolina, mentioning the eminent Dr. Griffin and his specimen, and distributed woodcuts of beautiful, bare-breasted mermaids — images that bore no resemblance to the shriveled object itself.

The illusion was deliberately self-debunking only in retrospect; at the time it worked. Griffin “lectured” on natural history, the press relayed the controversy, and crowds poured into the exhibition — first at a Broadway concert hall, then at Barnum’s American Museum, where receipts reportedly tripled. The specimen, when finally seen, was a small, blackened, agonized-looking thing that Barnum himself described as ugly; the gap between the advertised maiden and the actual relic was part of the entertainment. Naturalists and a skeptical southern press denounced it as a fraud within the year, and the mermaid’s authenticity collapsed even as Barnum’s fame grew.

The Feejee Mermaid became the template for Barnum’s career: not the sale of a believable object, but the orchestration of curiosity through a fake expert, manufactured news, and seductive imagery, with the public half-aware it might be humbugged and paying to find out. The original specimen’s fate is uncertain; it is generally believed to have been destroyed in one of the fires that consumed Barnum’s and Kimball’s collections in the nineteenth century, with a related specimen later associated with Harvard’s Peabody Museum.