Читать книгу The Shadow of Solomon: The Lost Secret of the Freemasons Revealed - Laurence Gardner - Страница 23

Not just confined to the dusty backrooms of Gresham College or to fume-laden laboratory workshops, the world of the founding fraternity was one of committed enthusiasts who took their working debates into every corner of their lives. It was a constant whirl of frock-coated, bewigged gentlemen, embroiled in the fevered conversation of inns and coffee houses. The City of London presented a more colourful stage than they had found in Oxford. It was a world of doctors and merchants, financiers, fine ladies and costermongers—all amid a bustle of carriages in narrow, rutted streets where flower girls cried, paupers begged, and the women of the night plied their trade.

Working colleagues though the Fellows were, it cannot be said that all was friendship and harmony within the group. In fact, there were many disputes—some heated but short-lived, while others rumbled on over the years. At one meeting, the botanist Sir Hans Sloane (whose manuscripts eventually formed the core of the British Museum collection in 1753) was rebuked by the President for making faces at his dissenters, and the medical professor John Woodward even fought a duel on the College steps after a row had disrupted the proceedings.

Within the Sloane collection was Manuscript 3848. Now at the British Library (dated October 1646) it is a constitutional document of old Masonic Charges from 77 years before James Anderson compiled his Constitutions,⁹ and is one of the pre-1688 documents that Anderson accused Christopher Wren of losing. Also, Sloane Manuscript 3323 is of a similar masonic nature, as is SM 3329—and both are from the latter 1600s. The important document in this group is 3848—the others appear to stem from it. Unlike the Regius and Cooke manuscripts (see page 23), the content of Sloane 3848 is mainly of Scottish origin¹⁰ and discusses, among other things, the secret words of Freemasonry and rituals of identification.

In the course of occasional Society arguments, certain important discoveries were shelved and ultimately forgotten—a good example being Robert Hooke’s 1662 marine chronometer for determining longitude. Consequently, a century later, the research was begun again from scratch by the Yorkshire joiner John Harrison. He achieved his result knowing nothing of Hooke’s original design, which was not rediscovered until 1950 in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.¹¹

In contrast, however, there were times when the Fellows would leap to each other’s aid. On one occasion, Christopher Wren was specifically asked to submit the result of an experiment concerning the incubation of chickens’ eggs but, owing to more pressing commitments, he failed to comply. Nevertheless, Hooke told the President that he had indeed received Wren’s submission in part, and he covered for his friend by verbally concocting a most plausible temporary report.

The worst disputes arose by virtue of Robert Hooke’s salaried employment as the Society’s Curator, whereas the other Fellows were all fee-paying members. Because of his specifically defined occupation, it was Hooke’s role to conceive and progress all manner of experiments, passing them over to others for completion, and then helping them when necessary. The problem was that it often became a matter of debate as to who could actually claim credit for any resultant discovery or invention.

In February 1665, Samuel Pepys described in his diary a particular Society meeting at which Hooke (then aged 30) lectured on the nature of comets, proving with dates and examples that comets are periodic. At that time there was a nine-year-old boy living nearby in Shoreditch. His name was Edmund Halley, and he grew to become one of the most famous astronomers of all time—the Astronomer Royal no less. However, for all his great accomplishments and deserved status, Halley is most popularly remembered for announcing in 1704 that comets are periodic, long after Hooke was recorded by Pepys as pronouncing the very same.

In his 1665 book of microscopic studies entitled Micrographia, Robert Hooke commented on the concentric bands of coloured light which appear around the central area of a tight air-space between two sheets of transparent mica pressed together. From his studies in light waves, he determined that the rings were the result of interference, and that they occur when the separation between the surfaces is of the same order as the wavelength of light. Meanwhile, there was a young fellow studying for his bachelor ‘s degree at Cambridge named Isaac Newton. Many years later, Newton commented on these very same light bands, and today they are known as Newton’s Rings.¹²

Long before Isaac Newton came into the group’s philosophical arena, Robert Hooke began the first specifically defined research into gravity. Setting a pendulum swinging, he noted that the wider the commencing arc, the longer it took to come to a halt. But why should it come to a halt at all and what force was it that drew the pendulum gradually, through decreasing arcs, to an eventual standstill? The answer was, of course, gravity—a subject which Robert was destined to pursue, for it baffled him that everything pulled or fell downwards, except for the stars which remained in their suspended positions. There had to be scientific laws which determine the nature and function of earthly weight, or the apparent lack of it in the heavens.

Hooke’s Micrographia is one of the greatest scientific volumes ever published, and without doubt the foremost of all works concerning microscopy and biological research. But it was not limited to views through a microscope; there were telescopic observations of the moon and stars, descriptions of his newly invented thermometer, his barometer, his wind gauge and a hygrometer for measuring atmospheric humidity. He distinguished heat from burning, citing that burning ceases when oxygen expires no matter how much heat is applied, and put forward an abundance of revelatory material which brought proven science firmly out of the vague philosophical arena in which it had existed for so long.

This then was the operative scientific world of the Rosicrucian brotherhood in England. In terms of ultimate achievement, however, the Society’s heyday was far from over, and the greatest of all scientists, Isaac Newton, was yet to appear on the scene, 16 years before the 1688 Revolution.