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.