Würzburg lying stones

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Würzburg Lying Stones in the Dutch Teylers Museum

The Würzburg Lying Stones (also Beringer Lying Stones ) are fake fossils made from limestone from the Main Franconian shell limestone . They were found in considerable numbers at the beginning of the 18th century by the Würzburg professor Johann Beringer (1667–1738). It is one of the most famous fossil forgeries in the history of paleontology .

Acquisition

Beringer was a doctor of medicine and philosophy and a personal physician to the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg . Like all physicians of that time, who were also assigned to work as naturalists, he had to collect and examine the three realms of nature (animals, plants, minerals / stones) for the benefit of mankind. The doctors of the time corresponded with each other and exchanged their natural products.

On May 31, 1725, three young people brought him several of these strange new limestone stones . The 14, 17 and 18 year old messengers claimed to have found the stones in a vineyard near Eibelstadt . Beringer was initially suspicious, but during a visit to the site he excavated such stones himself and therefore commissioned the young people to carry out further excavations. According to Beringer's own statements, around 2,000 pieces were excavated in the following six months and acquired for more than three hundred Reichstaler . On the basis of the unique finds, Beringer planned to set up a new natural history cabinet in Würzburg , which he wanted to make publicly accessible.

Objects

Three lying stones, exhibited in the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt

The stones showed the unheard of: Plants and various fossilized animals, for example a bat with wings and a giant mite that has just caught a fly , as well as a spider in its web and a bee approaching a flower. Other stones contained Hebrew characters that made up the tetragram , curly stars, and other strange cosmological symbols. From today's perspective, some of these stones have downright humorous motifs, such as copulating frogs or flies. The frogs are not designed as skeletons , but are reminiscent of naive relief work . Many insects can be seen, including a petrified maggot that fits exactly into a hole in the rock, as well as vertebrates that peek out of a hole in the stone. Today the fakes look clumsy and ridiculous.

However, since the mere existence of fossils was only just known at that time and a theory of fossilization had not been developed, it explains why not all fakes were initially recognized. In addition to fossilized skeletons, Beringer was also presented with the fossilization of a completely preserved body.

publication

Beringer himself initially believed in the authenticity of what he figure stones mentioned findings and announced in Leipzig on October 4, 1725 New papers of learned things a publication on. While composing his work, Beringer recognized that individual objects were forged, which is why he refrained from depicting and describing them while writing his work. In 1726 the stones he acquired appeared in a lavishly designed book, with which the later professor of anatomy and surgery Georg Ludwig Hüber had obtained his doctorate, with the title Lithographiae Wirceburgensis: specimen primum. in which he cataloged the finds with detailed drawings on 21 copperplate engravings and described them together with real fossils. He also described the site and discussed how the finds could not have been made.

Since he had no answer to the question of how it came about, he asked specialist scholars in his work to also devote themselves to clearing up this question. Beringer believed the stones would verify the theory of vis plastica proposed by the Persian scholar Avicenna in the 11th century. According to this, all forms of living beings to be found in nature would be prefigured as plastic models in stone.

consequences

Beringer only recognized the fraud towards the end of 1732 (a stone had his name on it), shortly before the publication of his second volume, which then no longer appeared. He then tried to buy back the entire edition of his work and had many copies in his possession destroyed. His scientific reputation was not ruined by the attempted fraud and he continued to teach at the medical faculty in Würzburg until his death in April 1738 . After Beringer's death, the remainder of his work was bought by a Leipzig library and given a new title in 1767. To date, around 600 copies of the more than 2000 lying stones that have been collected can be traced or preserved. You are u. a. in the Würzburg University Library , in the Würzburg Mainfränkisches Museum , in the Natural History Museum in Bamberg , in the Natural History Cabinet Waldenburg , in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem and in the Bavarian State Collection for Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich . The poet Eduard Mörike and the builder of the Würzburg residence , Balthasar Neumann , also owned such stones at the time. Beringer had sent some of these stones himself to his colleagues, with whom he corresponded, for assessment; others were passed on.

The interrogation protocols show that Beringer had several imitation artefacts ("image stones") put under by two colleagues from Würzburg: by the former Jesuit Ignatz Roderique , now professor of geography, algebra and analysis, and by Johann Georg von Eckhart , Privy Councilor and Court and university librarian. With the help of a Christian Zänger from Eibelstadt, the two wanted to convince Beringer that the Eibelstadt boys could have done this because of the money. According to the protocols, Roderique had chiseled out the figures in Eckhart's apartment, and the 17-year-old teenager had then smoothed them with fine abrasive powder.

The lying stones themselves became coveted collector's items (for example Eduard Mörike bought some) that were forged himself.

Trivia

Eduard Mörike processed the stone purchase in his poem "Quittung".

See also

literature

Primary literature

  • Johannes Bartholomäus Adam Beringer: Litographiae Wirceburgensis, ducentis lapidum figuratorum, a potiori insectiformium, prodigiosis imaginibus exornatae specimen primum. Würzburg 1726 (online) .

Secondary literature

  • Martin Doll: Monstrous objects. About forgeries as objects of knowledge in a twofold sense. In: Journal for Cultural Studies. Bielefeld, No. 1, 2007, pp. 39-51. ISSN  2197-9103 .
  • Martin Doll: Counterfeit and fake. On the discourse-critical dimension of deception . Kadmos Kulturverlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86599-140-9 , pp. 77-105.
  • Birgit Niebuhr, Gerd Geyer: Beringer's Lying Stones. 493 Corpora Delicti between fiction and truth . (= Beringeria. Würzburg geoscientific communications. Special issue 5, part II). Edited by Friends of the Würzburg Geosciences. Würzburg 2005. ISSN  0937-0242 (with an inventory of all known lying stones ).
  • Birgit Niebuhr: Beringer's Lying Stones from 1725. A supplement. In: Beringeria. Würzburg geoscientific communications. Würzburg 37.2007, pp. 105-119. ISSN  0937-0242 (with an addendum to the inventory of all known lying stones ).
  • Birgit Niebuhr: Who lied here? The Würzburg Lügenstein Affair. In: fossils. No. 1/2006, pp. 15–19 ( PDF ( Memento of 13 September 2014 in the Internet Archive ) 886 kB).
  • Anne-Kathrin Reulecke: Forgery at the origin. Johann Beringer's “Lithographiae Wirceburgensis” (1726) and the exploration of the natural world. In: Trajectories. Journal of the Center for Literary Research. Berlin 7.2003, pp. 39-44. ISSN  1616-3036 .
  • Petra Hubmann: Johannes Bartholomäus Adam Beringer (1670–1738) a Catholic natural scientist and early enlightenment man as an example of the professionalization of the academic philosophical medicine in the early 18th century dissertation . Faculty of Human Sciences at the Technical University of Darmstadt, 2010.
  • Wilhelm Simonis : To the development of the Würzburg botany. In: Peter Baumgart (Ed.): Four hundred years of the University of Würzburg. A commemorative publication. Degener & Co. (Gerhard Gessner), Neustadt an der Aisch 1982 (= sources and contributions to the history of the University of Würzburg. Volume 6), ISBN 3-7686-9062-8 , pp. 601–627; here: p. 603 f.

Web links

Commons : Würzburger Lügensteine  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Henning Bärmig: The personal bibliographies of the professors who taught at the Medical Faculty of the Alma Mater Julia zu Würzburg from 1582 to 1803 with biographical information. Medical dissertation, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg 1969, p. 42 f.
  2. ^ Heinrich Zankl: Forgers, swindlers, charlatans. Research and Science Fraud . Wiley-VCH, Weinheim 2003, p. 213 f.
  3. ^ Wilhelm Simonis : To the development of the Würzburg botany. In: Peter Baumgart (Ed.): Four hundred years of the University of Würzburg. A commemorative publication. Degener & Co. (Gerhard Gessner), Neustadt an der Aisch 1982 (= sources and contributions to the history of the University of Würzburg. Volume 6), ISBN 3-7686-9062-8 , pp. 601–627; here: p. 604.
  4. ↑ Eberhard Schnepf: Forgeries - not only in our time . In: Biology in Our Time. Volume 32, No. 4, 2002, p. 248.
  5. ↑ Michaela Schneider: Fake News from Würzburg Muschelkalk . In: Main-Echo from September 27, 2019