Genealogy of the Barker Family of Andover: Volume 4 Genealogical Series - Paperback

by Enders Anthony Robinson (Author)

In early modern Europe it was generally believed that the Devil employed his hellish agents to plague and tempt the select of God. The consequences were witchcraft trials which culminated in Salem in 1692. What is unique about Salem is that it occurred well after the great European witchcraft epidemics had ceased. In Europe by the year 1650, people were turning to explanations of natural phenomena based on scientific experimentation. The settlers in New England participated in this intellectual awakening. They accepted science as an ally, believing that scientific truth could not clash with revealed truth. One of the earliest New England scientists was John Winthrop, Jr. Widely traveled, he brought the first astronomical telescope to America. Winthrop's observations of American fauna and flora were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1670. Thomas Brattle, a New England merchant, was a mathematician and an amateur astronomer. He made observations of Halley's Comet, of eclipses of the sun and moon, and of variations of the magnetic needle. His contributions won the attention of Sir Isaac Newton. In 1688 in England, Sir Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica. This book initiated the scientific study of the visible universe. In 1689 in New England, Cotton Mather published Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions. This book was Cotton Mather's first attempt to give a scientific account of the invisible universe of the Devil. In Latin, he wrote, "Haec ipse miserrima vidi," or "These things these wretched eyes beheld." Together with his numerous sermons and pamphlets, his book represented a major effort to instill in the minds of the people a belief in the reality of witchcraft and a fear of witches. The result is that the name of Cotton Mather is the name most enduringly linked to episode of Salem witchcraft in 1692. The English Puritans had moved to New England in order to gain the liberty to worship God as they chose. Their aim was to form orderly communities "without pope, prelate, presbytery, prince, or parliament." However, with the establishment of any organized system, there are always voices of dissent. In 1692 William Barker, a resident of Andover, was arrested for witchcraft. His confession, in part, reads: "He confesses he has been in the snare of the devil three years. That the devil first appeared to him like a black man and perceived he had a cloven foot. That the devil demanded of him to give up himself Soul & Body unto him, which he promised to do. Barker said he had a great family; the world went hard with him and was willing to pay every man his own. Barker confesses he was at a meeting of witches at Salem Village where he judges there were about a hundred of them. Satan's design was to set up his own worship, abolish all the churches in the land, to fall next upon Salem and so go through the country. He saith the devil promised that all his people should live bravely, that all persons should be equal; that there should be no day of resurrection or of judgement, and neither punishment nor shame for sin." Barker's words, "People should live bravely, that all persons should be equal," represented an expression of the idea of freedom. In 1776, this sentiment was more clearly expressed by Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." The wisdom of William Barker and Thomas Jefferson won the day, not the notions of Cotton Mather.

Author Biography

Enders Anthony Robinson is the Professor Emeritus of Geophysics in the Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Chair at Columbia University in City of New York. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 18, 1930. He received from MIT a SB in mathematics in 1950, a SM in economics in 1952 and a PhD in geophysics in 1954. In 1950 vast areas of the world, including great sedimentary basins and nearly all water-covered regions, were impervious to oil exploration because of intrinsic limitations in analog methods. In 1950-1954 Robinson at MIT, as a research assistant in mathematics and a research associate in geophysics, was the first to apply the methods of digital signal processing to the seismic records used in oil exploration. He used the Whirlwind digital computer at MIT and the Ferranti digital computer at the University of Toronto. His PhD thesis introduced the digital concept of deconvolution, which was successful in opening up every area of the world to oil exploration. The deconvolution process removed the unwanted reverberations that obscured the desired primary reflections. Robinson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States and a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. In 2001, Robinson received the Maurice Ewing Gold Medal from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists with the citation, "For a lifetime of remarkable achievements that began while he was in MIT graduate school, when he in essence invented the field of digital seismic data processing. The progress in our science over the last 50 years in large part has evolved from the work of Enders Robinson." In 2003, the European Academy of Sciences awarded Robinson the Blaise Pascal Medal for Science and Technology as "the father of digital geophysics." In 2005, the International Astronomical Union, which acts as the internationally recognized authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies, named the asteroid Svenders with the citation, "In 1952 Enders Robinson became the first ever to perform signal processing on a digital computer." In 2010, the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers awarded the Desiderius Erasmus Award to Robinson with the citation, "His early research laid the groundwork for seismic deconvolution and the widespread use of geophysical digital filters in general. Universally recognized as an eminent scientist, Dr. Robinson has aptly been described as one of the living legends of exploration geophysics."