Message #193301

[Silas]

Beringer was taken in because he was obstinate and because the stones fit the early 18th-century debate about the origins of fossils (Gould 1998). He compared his stones against various theories: relics of the Flood, the vagaries of Nature, created by a "marvelous force of petrifying moisture and salts of the earth" or some subterranean "generative vapor." But the 100 or so with inscriptions, unlike anything found before, baffled him. "For whatever power has fashioned [them] the agent...has surpassed his limits by employing the art of writing, and has traced the characters of several languages, but especially those of the sacred tongue, so exactly in accordance with the rules of Hebrew orthography that they were adjudged in the opinion of experts to extol in eloquent titles the most holy name, power, and wisdom of God, and thus perhaps manifest the one and only author of these wondrous stones."