The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read Online Free Page B

paribus (“all other things being equal”)—that is, if you wish to understand a controlling difference between two systems, keep all other features constant, for the difference may then be attributed to the only factor that you have allowed to vary. If, for example, you wish to test the effect of a new diet pill, try to establish two matched groups—folks of the same age, sex, weight, nutrition, health, habits, ethnicity, and so on. Then give the pill to one group and a placebo to the other (without telling the subjects what they have received, for such knowledge would, in itself, establish inequality based on differing psychological expectations).The technique, needless to say, does not work perfectly (for true ceteris paribus can never be obtained), but if the pill group loses a lot of weight, and the placebo group remains as obese as before, you may conclude that the pill probably works as hoped.
    Ceteris paribus represents a far more distant pipe dream in trying to understand two different contexts in the developing history of a profession—for we cannot now manipulate a situation of our own design, but must study past circumstances in complex cultures not subject to regulation by our experimental ideals at all. But any constancy between the two contexts increases our hope of illustrating and understanding their variations in the following special way: if we examine the different treatment of the same object in two cultures, worlds apart, then at least we can attribute the observed variation to cultural distinctions, for the objects treated do not vary.
    The effectively identical Lügensteine of early-eighteenth-century Würzburg and modern Marrakech embody such an interesting difference in proposed meaning and effective treatment by two cultures—and I am not sure that we should be happy about the contrast of then and now. But we must first correct the legend of Beringer and the original Lügensteine if we wish to grasp the essential difference.
    As so often happens when canonical legends arise to impart moral lessons to later generations, the standard tale distorts nearly every important detail of Beringer’s sad story. (I obtained my information primarily from an excellentbook published in 1963 by Melvin E. Jahn and Daniel J. Woolf, The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer , University of California Press. Jahn and Woolf provide a complete translation of Beringer’s volume, along with extensive commentary about the paleontology of Beringer’s time. I used original sources from my own library for all quotations not from Beringer in this essay.)

    Note the exuberance and (by modern standards) whimsical nature of Beringer’s fake fossils from 1726 .
    First of all, on personal issues not directly relevant to the theme of this essay, Beringer wasn’t tricked by a harmless student prank but rather purposely defrauded by two colleagues who hated his dismissive pomposity and wished to bring him down. These colleagues—J. Ignatz Roderick, professor of geography and algebra at the University of Würzburg, and Georg von Eckhart, librarian to the court and the university—“commissioned” the fake fossils (or, in Roderick’s case, probably did much of the carving himself), and then hired a seventeen-year-old boy, Christian Zänger (who may also have helped with the carving), to plant them on the mountain. Zänger, a double agent of sorts, was then hired by Beringer (along with two other boys, both apparently innocent of the fraud) to excavate and collect the stones.
    This information for revising the canonical tale lay hidden for two hundred years in the incomplete and somewhat contradictory records of hearings held in April 1726 before the Würzburg cathedral chapter and the city hall of Eivelstadt (the site of Beringer’s mountain just outside Würzburg). The German scholar Heinrich Kirchner discovered these documents in 1934 in the town archives of