“On their arrival at Syracuse I met them and urged them to be cautious, reminding them that a mistake might prove very injurious to the reputation of the regents and to the standing of scientific men in the State; that if the matter should turn out to be a fraud, and such eminent authorities should be found to have committed themselves to it, there would be a guffaw from one end of the country to the other at the expense of the men intrusted by the State with its scientific and educational interests. Next day they went to Cardiff; they came, they saw, and they narrowly escaped being conquered.”
Yet with this caution before them, the erosion so shrewdly preserved by Hull convinced these eminent scientists. When such high scientific authority was deceived by Hull’s inventive genius, it is not strange that the great public of America and Europe insisted on believing it to be a “petrified giant.”
Dr. White in his history of the “Giant” above quoted says:
“At no period of my life have I ever been more discouraged regarding the possibility of making reason prevail among men. There seemed no possibility of suspending the judgment of the great majority who saw the statue. As a rule they insisted in believing it a ‘petrified giant’.
There was but one thing in the figure, as I had seen it, which puzzled me, and that was the grooving of the under side, apparently by currents of water which would require many years.”
Dr. White continues:
“The catastrophe now approached rapidly as affidavits of men of high character in Illinois and Iowa established the fact that the figure was made at Fort Dodge, in Iowa, of a great block of gypsum and transported to the railroad and thence to Chicago where a German stone-cutter gave it its final shape.”
When the evidence became too strong to be successfully combated, and Hull had disposed of his interest in his “invention” for $23,000, he became elated over the fame he had acquired, admitted that he was the originator of the “Petrified Giant” and enjoyed greatly the discomfiture of the scientists whom he had deceived. Finally
