1 8 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PAL/EON TOLOGY. 



Lhuyd found an enthusiastic supporter in the Lucerne 

 physician and councillor, Karl Nikolaus Lang, whose Historia 

 lapidum figuratorum Helvetice (Venice, 1708) contains 163 

 plates, with a number of good figures of fossils. Lang is one 

 of the last authors who believed in the direct origin of the 

 fossils in the rocks. 



A semi-tragic, semi-comic event brought this literature to a 

 close. Johannes Bartholomew Beringer, a professor in the 

 University of Wiirzburg, published in 1726 a palreontological 

 work entitled Lithographia Wurcebitrgensis. In it a number 

 of true fossils were illustrated, belonging to the Muschelkalk or 

 Middle Trias of North Bavaria, and beside these were more or 

 less remarkable forms, even sun, moon, stars, and Hebraic 

 letters, said to be fossils, and described and illustrated as such 

 by the professor. As a matter of fact, his students, who no 

 longer believed in the Greek myth of self-generation in the 

 rocks, had placed artificially-concocted forms in the earth, and 

 during excursions had inveigled the credulous professor to 

 those particular spots and discovered them ! But when at 

 last Beringer's own name was found apparently in fossil form 

 in the rocks, the mystery was revealed to the unfortunate 

 professor. He tried to buy up and destroy his published 

 work; but in 1767 a new edition of the work was published, 

 and the book is preserved as a scientific curiosity. Many 

 of the false fossils (Liigensteine) may be seen in the 

 mineral collections at Bamberg, and there are also speci- 

 mens in the university collections of Wiirzburg, Munich, 

 and other places. 



Contemporaneously with these mistaken efforts in the 

 sixteenth, seventeenth, and early part of the eighteenth 

 century, a truer appreciation of fossils was gaining ground. 



In the year 1580, the famous French worker in enamel, 

 Bernard Palissy, published a book in which he discussed the 

 origin of petrified wood, the occurrence of fossil fishes in 

 Mansfield slate, and fossil molluscs in various rocks. 

 Palissy rightly pointed out that many of the fossil conchylia 

 were identical with living species, and said they must have 

 developed in localities which had previously been under fresh 

 or sea- water. Palissy's ideas were violently attacked by his 

 compatriots, and he was denounced as a heretic in his 

 philosophical and scientific writings, just as he was a 

 Huguenot and a heretic in his religion. 



