If the reader has bestowed any attention on the preceding part of this work, he will have been enabled to discover that what I have designated as " Prehistoric Masonry " is nothing more than a collection of legends and traditions derived from various sources and, apparently, invented at different periods during the Middle Ages, when the Fraternity of Freemasons was a thoroughly Operative association, composed of architects and builders, with a few unprofessional men of rank and wealth, who had been accepted by the Craft as patrons or honorary members. It is, however, only in compliance with the usage of historians that I have consented to adopt the use of this term "prehistoric" in reference to the present subject, and not because I have considered it to be an absolutely correct one when applied to the history of Freemasonry. Anthropologists have divided the chronological series of events in every nation or race into two distinct periods - the prehistoric and the historic. The former includes the time when the inhabitants of a country were in a condition of utter barbarism, from which they gradually raised themselves to a higher state of civilization. Of the fact even of the existence of such a primitive people we have no evidence, except certain myths and legends, in which they appear to have embodied their ideas of religious belief, and, at a somewhat later period in their progress toward civilization, some fragmentary records, to be found principally in the hieroglyphic monuments of ancient Egypt and in the cuneiform inscriptions of old Assyria. But when a nation or race began, by the natural process of advancement, to emerge from this lower sphere of intellectual debasement to a higher one, its first labor was to preserve the evidences of its existence and the memorial of its transactions in written records. All before this era of emergence from oral traditions to records has been called by anthropologists the "prehistoric period" - all after the historic. Now it is very evident that no such division can, in strictness, be applied to the history of Freemasonry. Viewed as an association of builders, when there ceases to be a record of the association, it must be supposed that it did not exist.

There are no legends or traditions whose existence can be traced to a period anterior to that which contains historic records of the society. These legends and traditions, all of which have been given in the first part of this work, were not, like the primeval myths of the prehistoric nations, the outgrowth of an uneducated religious sentiment wholly unconnected with and independent of any record of real events which occurred, or were occurring, at the same time. On the contrary, they sprang up in the Middle Ages, at the very time when Freemasonry was making its indelible record in the history of Europe. They were fabricated by Freemasons who had long before been recognized in history as an association of some importance. They were not the spontaneous growth of some primitive body of builders, known to us only by these legends which had been orally transmitted from the earliest prehistoric times. They were the inventions of a later period, most of the facts which they detailed being borrowed from historical records, principally from the Bible or from ecclesiastical historians, and they were indebted for their fabrication partly to a desire to magnify the antiquity of the Institution and partly to the influence of that legendary spirit which prevailed in the Middle Ages, and which we find still more extensively developed in the legends of the Saints which have been accepted by the Roman Catholic Church. These Masonic legends differ also in another respect from the prehistoric myths of antiquity.

As soon as a nation began to make its history, its myths were relegated to their proper place in the region of mythology and the history continued to be written without any admixture with them. They were considered as things of the past. They had their inevitable influence upon the religion of the people, but they were not intruded into its political history. But from the very time of the fabrication of the Masonic legends and traditions, they were accepted as a part of the annals of the association and were incorporated into it as a portion of its true history. As such they have been maintained almost to the present day. In this way we have two histories of Freemasonry which have always been presenting themselves to our consideration with the assumption of an equal claim to our credence.

We have in the first place, the authentic history, gathered from the records of all the building guilds and confraternities from the time of Numa, and which, assuming various forms at different periods, finally has culminated in the Speculative Freemasonry of the present day. And then we have a mass of legends and traditions fabricated in the Middle Ages, and some others of a later day. These have been obtruded into the authentic history, have grown up alongside of it, and have presented and sought to preserve a different and, of course, an apocryphal form of history. Looking at the time and manner of the fabrication of these legends and the persistent way in which for some centuries they have traveled down the stream of pari passu with the authentic history, it would perhaps have been better to designate them as " extra- historic," rather than "prehistoric" something not before history, but something outside of history. Yet, as they have been made to assume the appearance of prehistoric legends, and have claimed, however incorrectly, to be traditions of the origin and progress of the Institution at a time when there were no written records of its existence, I have felt myself excusable, and perhaps even justifiable, in tolerating temporarily this mistaken view, under the protest of this explanation, and of adopting the usage of historians in their treatment of the histories of nations.

As a matter, therefore, of convenience I have used the term "pre- historic," although I am well convinced that there is no such thing as a "prehistoric Freemasonry." There is, unquestionably, a prehistoric architecture. The art of building, so as to secure shelter from the inclemencies of the seasons and protection from the incursions of wild beasts, was practiced at a period long antecedent to the existence of any written records of the existence of the arts. The Troglodytes must have made alterations for their greater comfort, convenience, and security in the rude caves which they made their homes, and the lake-dwellers of prehistoric Helvetia exhibited, as we may judge from their remains, considerable skill and ingenuity in the construction of their lacustrine houses. But architecture, when it is not united with and practiced by an organized craft, guild, or fraternity, is not Freemasonry. Therefore prehistoric architecture and prehistoric Freemasonry are two entirely different things. Of the former we have monumental records; of the latter we have no evidence, and the term is used only as a facon deparler, as a matter of convenience, and as a concession to common usage in the treatment of historical subjects. There is one very marked difference in character between the prehistoric myths of antiquity and the legends of Freemasonry, which, for the reason just assigned, I have placed in the supposititious prehistoric period of that institution.

The myths of the earliest peoples found their origin and groundwork in an enforced observance of the contending powers of nature. The nomadic races, wandering over the wide plains and lofty mountains of the East, were necessarily struck by the alternate changes of darkness and light, of night and day. They saw and they feared the dark sky with its diadems of glittering stars and its murky clouds; these they beheld dispersed by the rosy dawn, before which stars and clouds and darkness fled as the wild game flees before the hunter. Then they beheld the glorious sun, ushered in by the dawn, traverse the sky, at length to be destroyed in the far West by the recuperated forces of night, which again reigned supreme over the earth, until it was anew dispersed by the ever-renewing dawn. This perpetually recurring elemental strife gave rise to the formation of myths, which formulated fables of the wars of these opposing forces of nature, just as, later, men in the historic period described the battles of contending armies. These simple myths * were undoubtedly the first acts of the human mind.

(* Goldziher says that the myth is the result of a purely psychological operations, and is, together with language, the oldest act of the human mind. "Mythology Among the Henrews," ch. i., p. 3.)

As time passed onward and the intellect became more cultivated, the myths were developed into a definite form of religious faith, the forces of nature were impersonated as actual, living dieties. The primitive Aryans, out of the fire which descended from the clouds in the forked lightning, and the fire which they brought by friction out of the wood, both of which they deemed to be identical, made their god Agni. *

(* In the old Vedic faith, Agni is sometimes addressed as the one great god who makes all things, sometimes as the light which fills the heavens, sometimes as the blazing lightning, or as the clear flame of earthly fire. "Con. Aryan Mythology," vol. ii., p. 190.)

At a later period their Greek descendants symbolized the all. healing and purifying sun, whose rays disperse the morbific influences of malaria, as Herakles destroying the hydra of the Lernaean marshes, or as the light-diffusing Phoebos Apollo, who pictured the solar rays by his flowing locks of golden hair and his quiver filled with arrows. Thus it was that the simple nature-myths of the primeval nations, Aryan and Semitic, were in the progress of time resolved into a system of complicated mythology that became the popular religion of the ancient nations. But this mythology was perfectly separated from political and national history. The prehistoric mythology of Greece and Rome was always distinct from Grecian and Roman authentic history. Though in the earliest period when history began to emerge from tradition there was, undoubtedly, some confused admixture of the two, yet, as each nation began to keep its records, the two streams were made to flow in different channels, and the mythical and the historical elements were not permitted to intermingle.

The priests preserved the fromer in their temple services, and the poets only referred to them in their epics and in their odes; the philosophus and the historians confined their instructions to the latter. But it has not been so with the legends, which may be called the myths, of Freemasonry. Springing into existence not at any early, prehistoric period, but receiving their form at the very time when Masonry was already an historical institution, these traditions have traveled down contemporaneously with its authentic narratives, not in two independent and separated streams, but in one commingled current. At the period when the speculative element of Masonry withdrew itself from the alliance which it had always maintained, the traditions contained in the Legend of the Craft, which constitute the great body of Masonic myths, were incorporated into and made an inseparable part of the true history. Nothing was rejected; everything was accepted as authentic; and indeed other legends borrowed from or suggested by Rabbinical and Talmudic reveries were added. Hence has arisen that inextricable and deplorable confusion of tradition and history, of false and true, of apocryphal and authentic, that we find in all the so-called histories of Freemasonry which were written in the 18th century. Nor did this false method of writing cease with the expiration of that period. It was continued into the 19th century, and its influence is still felt, not only in the opinions entertained by the masses of the Fraternity, but in the statements made in annual addresses before lodges, by men not always unlearned or unscholarly, but who do not hesitate to advance traditions and legends as a substitute for the true history of the Order. Of this mode of writing Masonic history, let us take at random a single passage from one of the works of the most eminent of the writers of this school.

"The Druidical Memoranda," says Dr. Oliver, * "were made in the Greek character, for the Druids had been taught Masonry by Pythagoras himself, who had communicated its area to them, under the name he had assigned to it in his own country. This distinguished appellation (Mesouraneo), in the subsequent declension and oblivion of the science, during the dark ages of barbarity and superstition, might be corrupted into MASONRY, as its remains, being merely operative, were confined to a few hands, and these artificers and working Masons." Here are no; less than five positive assertions, of which but one rests on the slightest claim of authority, while the whole of them are absolutely unhistorical.

(* "Antiquities of Freemasonry," Period I., ch. i., p. 17)

1. The statement that the Druids used the Greek character in their secret writing is made on the authority of a casual remark of Caesar but later authorities, much better than Caesar, on the subject of Druidism have shown that the character used by them was the old Irish Oghum alphabet.

2. The assertion that the Druids practiced or were acquainted with Masonry is altogether untenable. It is known that the dogmas and practices of their religion were antagonistic to those of Masonry.

3. The statement that they were taught Masonry by Pythagoras is met by the simple fact that philosopher never visited Britain.

4. All that is said about the Greek word Mesoureneo, as the term under which Masonry was known to Pythagoras and communicated by him to the Druids, is a mere fable. It had its origin in a whimsical etymology first proposed by Hutchinson, and which has never been accepted by competent philologists.

5. The implied doctrine contained in the close of the paragraph, that the first form of Masonry was Speculative, and that the Operative branch was merely what remained after the declension and decay of the science, to be practiced by working Masons, is in direct violation of all historic truth, which makes the Speculative element an after-thought and a development out of the Operative.

When history is thus caricatured, what chance is there that the unlearned shall find the truth; and what labor must be imposed on the learned in striving to extract the pure gold of facts from the worthless ore of tradition in which it has been imbedded? The mode of writing Masonic history which was adopted in the 18th century, and which, with some honorable exceptions, has been pursued almost to the present day, was one which was by no means calculated to elicit truth or to satisfy the inquiring mind.

A ground work for the history of Freemasonry was found in the Legend of the Craft. All the statements in that old document were accepted as authentic narratives of events that had actually occurred. Hence the origin of the institution was placed at a period anterior to the flood. All the patriarchs were declared to have been Masons; Noah and his sons were said to have been the means of transmitting its tenets from the antediluvians to the post-diluvians. Its progress was traced from Noah to Moses, who was said to have practiced its mystic rites in the wilderness. From Moses it was made to pass over to Solomon, who, in some incomprehensible way, was supposed to have organized, as its first Grand Master, an association which, however, according to the preceding history, appears to have been in existence thousands of years before. From the King of Israel it was made to pass over from Palestine to Europe, and is landed with little respect, or at least with no accounting for the lapse of time, in the kingdom of France, and in the time of Charles Martel. From him it crosses the Channel, and is reorganized in England in the reign of King Athelstan and by his brother Edwin. Such is the history of Freemasonry that for a century and a half has claimed and received almost universal belief from the Craft. And yet, perhaps there never was a history of any kind that could present so few claims to belief. It is fragmentary in its details. Centuries are passed over with no connecting link. From Abraham, who, it is said, "had learned well the science and the art (that is, Geometry and Operative Masonry), to Moses, who is called the Grand Master of the Jewish Masons, a period of more than four centuries passes with the most inefficient and unsatisfactory account, if it can be called an account at all, of how this science and art were transmitted from the one to the other. From Moses to Solomon there occurs a vast chasm of fifteen centuries, with scarcely an attempt to fill it up with a con. secutive series of intervening events. And so the fragmentary history goes on in intermittent leaps from Solomon to Zerubbabel, from Zerubbabel to Augustus, from Augustus to Charles Martel, and finally from him to Athelstan. It is contradictory in its statements. Claiming for the Institution a purely Hebrew character, it intermixes with strange inconsistency the labors and the patronage of Jewish patriarchs and Pagan monarchs, and finds as much of true Masonry in the works of the idolatrous Nebuchadnezzar as in those of King Solomon. But perhaps the most important fault of these 18th century historians of Freemasonry is the entire absence of all citation of authority for the records which they have made. They assume a statement to suit their theory, but give no evidence or support from contemporary profane or sacred writers that it is a genuine fact and not a bare assumption. The scholar who is seeking in his historical studies for truth and truth only, finds himself thus involved in a labyrinth of doubts, from which all the canons of criticism fail, how ever skillfully applied, to extricate him. He knows not when the writer is acting on the results of his own or some Predecessor's invention, or when he is reciting events that have really occurred. We are not to attribute to those writers who have thus made a romance instead of a history any willful intention to falsify the facts of history.

At first led astray by a misinterpretation of the Legend of the Craft, they had on this misinterpretation framed a theory of the antiquity of Freemasonry in a wrong direction, and then, as has occurred thousands of times before, they proceeded to fit the facts to the theory, and not, as they should have done, the theory to the facts. The doctrines of the new school of anthropology, which does' not admit that the origin of the whole human family is to be found solely in the Semitic race, were, in their day, unknown. If Freemasonry was older than the era of the revival and the establishment of the Grand Lodge of England, its antiquity was to be sought only in the line of the Jewish patriarchs. Thus it became venerable, not only by its age but by its religious character. To this line they wished, therefore, to confine the direction of its rise and progress, and they thought that they could find the proofs of this line of progress in their own interpretation of the Legend of the Craft, and the application to it of certain passages of Holy Writ. They succeeded in this, at least to their own satisfaction, because "the wish was father to the thought." But as they recognized the symbolic character of Freemasonry, and as they found some of the most important and expressive of these symbols prevailing in the Pagan associations of antiquity, they thought it necessary to account for this contemporary prevalence of the same ideas in two entirely different systems of religion in such a way as not to impair the validity of the claim of Masonry to a purely Semitic origin. This they did by supposing, that while the Divine truths inculcated by Speculative Masonry were preserved in their purity by those of the descendants of Noah who had retained the instructions which they had received from their great ancestor, there was at some era, generally placed at the time of the attempted building of the Tower of Babel, a secession of a large number of the human race from the purer stock. These seceders rapidly lost sight of the Divine truths which they had received at one time, and fell into the most grievous religious errors. Thus they corrupted the purity of the worship and the orthodoxy of the faith, the principles of which had been originally communicated to them. In this way there sprung up two streams of Masonry, distinguished by Dr. Oliver as the "Pure" and the "Spurious." The former was practiced by the descendants of Noah in the Jewish line, the latter by his descendants in the Pagan line. It is thus that these theorists account for the presence of a Masonic element, though a perverted one, in the mysteries of the ancient Pagan nations. There was afterward a union of these two lines, the Pure and the Spurious, at the building of the Temple of Jerusalem, when King Solomon involved the assistance and the cooperation of the heathen and idolatrous workmen of the King of Tyre.

The Spurious Freemasonry did not, however, cease to exist in consequence of this union at the Temple of the Jewish and Tyrian Freemasons. It lasted, indeed, for many centuries subsequent to this period. But the Jewish and Tyrian cooperation had effected a mutual infusion of their respective doctrines and ceremonies, which eventually terminated in the abolition of the two distinctive systems and the establishment of a new one, which was the immediate forerunner of the present Institution. This delightful romance, in which the imagination has been permitted to run riot, in which assumptions are boldly advanced for facts, and in which statements are made which there is no attempt to corroborate by reference to authority, has for years been accepted by thousands upon thousands of the Fraternity, and is still accepted by the masses as a veritable history of the rise and progress of Freemasonry. In my younger days, when my researches were directed rather to the deign and to the symbolism of the Order than to its history, which I was willing to take from older and more experienced heads, I had been attracted by the beauty and ingenuity of this romantic tale, and gave, without hesitation, my adhesion to it. But when my studies took an historical direction, and I began to apply the canons of criticism to what I was reading on this subject, I soon found and recognized that the landscape which I had viewed with so much pleasure was, after all, only a wonderful mirage. I have, therefore, been compelled to abandon this theory and to seek for one more plausible and more consistent with the facts of history. I have come to this conclusion, I admit, with great reluctance, because I was unwilling to throw aside the picture which I had so long admired and which was the work of masters whose labors I respected and whose memory I venerated. But I am forced to say, with Aristotle, that though Plato and Socrates be my friends, yet truth is a greater friend and one that I must value above them both. When we look at the course pursued by these Masonic historians of the early part of the 18th century, it is lamentable to think how many glorious opportunities of preserving facts in the history of the Institution have been lost by the mistaken direction of their views. We have in the History of St. Mary's Lodge, by Bro. J. Murray Lyon, a fair sample of what might have been done by Dr. Anderson, if he had pursued a similar plan in the composition of the two editions of the Constitutions compiled by him.

In 1723 he must have had access to many documents of great importance bearing on the history of Masonry in the latter part of the 17th and in the beginning of the 18th century. There were undoubtedly minutes of lodges which were accessible to him, but the lodges are now extinct and the records perhaps forever lost. In these he would have found authentic evidence of the manners and customs, the organization and the regulations, of the Operative Masons, and could have accurately defined the line through which Operative Masonry passed in its transmission and transmutation to a purely Speculative system. But on these subjects he has maintained unbroken silence. In the first edition he has not said a single word of the actual condition of Freemasonry at the time of his writing. But he has wasted pages in an inaccurate and unauthentic history of the rise and progress of architecture, which had been already written by far better authority, because a professional architect with equal ability can write history of his own science more skillfully than can a doctor of divinity. Even of the four lodges which in 1717 organized the Grand Lodge of England, a few lines comprise the brief account that he gives. He tells us their names and the locality in which they held their meetings, and no more. And yet these lodges must have had their history, there must have been a minute-book of some kind, however brief and imperfect might have been the records. And these minute- books, only three or four, must have been in existence before Anderson began the compilation of his book, and from his position in the Order must have been accessible to him. And yet he has treated these invaluable records-invaluable to the future Masonic historian and which should have been invaluable to him with a silence bordering almost on contempt. Comparing this treatment of the early English records with the manner in which Lyon has treated those of Scotland, we can not too much deplore this neglect of the real duties of a historian. The result of this difference of treatment of the same subject by two different historians has been that while we are made by Lyon familiar with the true history of the Scottish Lodges in the 17th century with their regulations, their usages, their modes of reception, and almost everything that appertains to their internal organization we are, so far as we can gather anything from Anderson, absolutely as ignorant of all that relates to the English Lodges of the same period as if no such bodies had ever existed. Such neglect of opportunities never to be recalled, such obdurate silence on topics of the deepest interest, and such waste of time and talent in the compilation of a jejune history of architecture instead of an authentic narrative of the Masonic history which was passing before his eyes, or with which he must have been familiar from existing documents, and from oral communication with many of the actors in that history, is to be not only deeply regretted, but to be contemplated almost as a crime.

Anderson's compilation has been that which gave form and feature to all subsequent histories of Freemasonry until a recent period. Smith, Calcott, Preston, and Oliver have followed in his footsteps, only pouring, as it were, from one vial into another, so that all the treatment of early Freemasonry anterior to the year 1717, as treated by English and French writers, has been almost wholly without the necessary element of authenticity. These historians have dealt in hypotheses, suggestions, assumptions, and romantic legends, so as to lead the scholar who studies their pages in search of historical light into an inextricable web of doubt and confusion.

The Germans have done better, and bringing the Teutonic instinct of laborious research to the investigation of Masonic history, they have made many approximations to the discovery of truth. And later English Masons forming a school of iconoclasts have begun, by the rejection of anachronisms and improbabilities, to give to that history a shape that will stand the crucial test of critical examination. It must be evident to the reader, from what has been said, that the history of Freemasonry, upon which this book is about to enter, will be treated in a method that seeks to approach that accuracy with which authentic history should always be written. From the causes already assigned, there must often be an embarrassment in finding proper evidence to authenticate the material offered to the inspection of the reader. But in no case will assumption be presented in the place of facts. When the supposed occurrence of events can not be proved by contemporaneous authority, such events will not be recorded as historical.

It may be conjectured that such events may have occurred, and such a conjecture is entirely legitimate, but its value will be determined by its plausibility. It will be a matter of logical inference, and not of historical statement. Thus one of the great errors of Anderson will be avoided, who continually presents his conjectures as facts, without discrimination, and thus leaves his reader in doubt as to when he is writing history and when indulging in romance or in assumptions. Pursuing this method, I am compelled to reject the universally received hypothesis that Freemasonry received its organization at the Temple of Solomon. I reject it because there is no historical evidence of the fact. The only authorities on this subject are the books of Kings and Chronicles. That of Josephus need not be referred to, because it is simply a compilation of Jewish history made up out of the Scriptural account. Now, the account of the events that occurred at the building of the Temple is very briefly related in those books, and it gives us no authority for saying that there was any organization of the builders, at that edifice, at all like the one described in our Masonic histories. Similar objections may be urged against all other propositions or theories which seek to connect the rise of the Masonic Institution from bodies which were not architectural in their character. I fall back, therefore, upon that theory which since the time of the Abbe Grandidier has been gradually gaining strength, and which connects the Speculative Masonry of our own times with the Operative Masonry of the Middle Ages. Never abandoning, for a moment, the predominant idea that Freemasonry, in whatever aspect it may be viewed, whether as Operative or Speculative, whether as ancient or modern, has always been connected in some way with the art of building and with a guild organization, I shall proceed to trace its early history not in religious communities or in social fraternities, but solely in the associations which have been organized for the pursuit and practice of architecture. Finding such associations among the ancient Romans I shall endeavor to pursue the course of these associations, from their birth in the imperial city and in the time and under the fostering care of Numa, to their dissemination with the Roman legions into the conquered provinces of Gaul, Germany, and Britain; their subsequent establishment in these countries of confraternities which they called Colleges of Workmen (Collegia Fabrorum), out of which, after the decay of the Empire and the extinction of the armies, was developed in the gradual course of civilization the societies of Traveling Freemasons, who sprang from the school of Como in Lombardy. Thence, by slow but certain steps, we shall advance to the time of the Operative or Stonemasons of Germany, France, and Britain, who were a development and result of the Comacine Fraternity. And lastly this will bring us to the era when the Operative system was wholly abandoned as a practice, and when the society was delivered up to the pursuit of a Speculative Philosophy, still, however, retaining the evidence within itself of its architectural parentage, by the selection of its symbols and its peculiar language as well as by many features of its internal organization.

The connection, according to this theory, of Freemasonry with the art of building, a connection that has never, even in its Speculative form, been wholly severed, will necessarily lead to digressions in the course of this history upon the subjects of Roman, Byzantine, and Gothic architecture. These subjects will have to be discussed, not as architectural studies, but solely in their close relationship to Freemasonry, and in respect to the reciprocal influences that were exerted upon Freemasonry and its followers by the varying systems of architecture and that produced on them by the skill and intelligence of the Freemasons. There will be no attempt to write a history of Architecture and to call it, as Dr. Anderson has unfortunately done, a history of Freemasonry, but the effort will be made to write a history of Freemasonry in its connection with, and its reference to, Architecture. "Every Freemasons" said the Chevalier Ramsay, in his visionary hypothesis, "is a Templar."

The truer doctrine is that in the olden time every Freemason was an architect, using this word in its purest and primitive meaning, to signify a builder. Mr. Hallam says, in his History of the Middle Ages, that "the curious subject of Freemasonry has unfortunately been treated of only by panegyrists or calumniators, both equally mendacious." And he thinks that it would be interesting to know more of the history of the Craft during a period in which they were literally architects. The desire here expressed, is the object and the design of this work to gratify. Whether the object has been successfully achieved can be determined only when the work is finished. Let me say, in concluding this preliminary essay - and I say it lest there should be any misconception of my views - that the theory which I shall seek to establish is not that the Freemasons of the present day are in direct and uninterrupted descent from the Roman Colleges of Artificers, but that these latter associations brought, by the Roman legions from the civilization of the Empire, into the comparatively unenlightened provinces of Gaul, Germany, and Britain, those sentiments of architectural beauty as well as those principles of architectural skill, which gave rise to the establishment of associations of builders, who in time constituted themselves into the form of guilds.

These guilds, or fraternities, at a very early period assumed an important place in the history and practice of the building art, and associated themselves together for the purpose of disseminating the principles and practice of building over certain parts of Europe. Thence arose the association known as "Traveling Freemasons," who, starting from their school in Lombardy, perambulated the continent and erected many important edifices, mostly of a religious character, such as monasteries and cathedrals. From these the Stonemasons of Germany, of France, and of England borrowed the system of guild-formation, that is to say, the usages and regulations of a guild in the practice of their profession.

These Operative Masons at various times admitted into the membership and privileges of their guild many persons of rank, influence, and learning, who were not professionally connected with the building art. These honorary admissions accomplished two objects: they were received as gratifying compliments by the non- professional members, and at the same time secured their good wishes and protection for the guild. But eventually a schism took place between the Operative Masons and the honorary members. The former adhered to the Operative Craft, but the latter, eliminating altogether the Operative element, formed a new guild or fraternity of Speculative Masons whose only connection with architecture or building was that they preserved much of its technical language and implements, but consecrated them to symbolical purposes. Having thus abandoned the professional practice of the craft of building, and assumed a merely ethical character, they became the Freemasons or the Speculative Masons of the present day. Such is a brief outline of the plan which will be pursued in the future prosecution of this history of the rise and progress of the Order of Freemasonry.

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