hor of Nature for his own
pleasure,"(139) that some of his students determined to give his faith
in that pious doctrine a thorough trial. They therefore prepared a
collection of sham fossils in baked clay, imitating not only plants,
reptiles, and fishes of every sort that their knowledge or imagination
could suggest, but even Hebrew and Syriac inscriptions, one of them
the name of the Almighty; and these they buried in a place where the
professor was wont to search for specimens. The joy of Beringer on
unearthing these proofs of the immediate agency of the finger of God in
creating fossils knew no bounds. At great cost he prepared this book,
whose twenty-two elaborate plates of facsimiles were forever to settle
the question in favour of theology and against science, and prefixed to
the work an allegorical title page, wherein not only the glory of his
own sovereign, but that of heaven itself, was pictured as based upon a
pyramid of these miraculous fossils. So robust was his faith that not
even a premature exposure of the fraud could dissuade him from the
publication of his book. Dismissing in one contemptuous chapter this
exposure as a slander by his rivals, he appealed to the learned world.
But the shout of laughter that welcomed the work soon convinced even its
author. In vain did he try to suppress it; and, according to tradition,
having wasted his fortune in vain attempts to buy up all the copies of
it, and being taunted by the rivals whom he had thought to overwhelm, he
died of chagrin. Even death did not end his misfortunes. The copies
of the first edition having been sold by a graceless descendant to a
Leipsic bookseller, a second edition was brought out under a new title,
and this, too, is now much sought as a precious memorial of human
credulity.(140)

(139) See Beringer's Lithographiae, etc., p. 91.

(140) See Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie, Munich, 1872, p. 467, note,
and Reusch, Bibel und Natur, p. 197. A list of authorities upon this
episode, with the text of one of the epigrams circulated at poor
Beringer's expense, is given by Dr. Reuss in the Serapeum for 1852, p.
203. The book itself (the original impression) is in the White Library
at Cornell University. For Beringer himself, see especially the
encyclopedia of Ersch and Gruber, and the Allgemeine deutsche
Biographie.

But even this discomfiture did not end the idea which had caused
it, for, although some latitude was allowed among th