THE YEAR is 1696. Labourers dig up an elephant’s skull in Gray’s Inn Road. At that stage, fossils were still unknown. The world, according to the Bible, had existed only since 4004 BC. What were people to conclude? Had elephants once roamed the streets of London and since become extinct? No, extinction too was an unknown concept. The only explanation that 18th-century scientists could devise was that the Romans must have brought an elephant with them to England.

Less than a mile away, still in London WC1, the elephant’s skull now lies in a glass case in the magnificently restored King’s Library of the British Museum. It was, of course, prehistoric. But the beauty of the museum’s new permanent exhibition Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the 18th Century, which opens next week in the King’s Library, is that it allows us to enter the minds of the inquisitive 18thcentury citizen, misconceptions and all, and to understand both how little and how much was known at the time of the British Museum’s inception 250 years ago.

The establishment of the museum was a revolutionary concept. The British Government was the first in the world to finance and build a public museum with the express intention of opening the frontiers of knowledge to all, free of charge. Before there was even a universal franchise, this was a radical notion.

After all, knowledge is empowering. If a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, a lot can be even more perilous, for rulers at least. Yet the then British Government took the values of Protestantism — which had translated the Mass from Latin to English to make it comprehensible to ordinary people — and transferred them to the acquisition of secular knowledge.

Governments today are likewise determined to open the wonders of the internet to as many people as possible. And the way that discoveries were made and interpreted in the 18th century bears more than a few similarities to the 21st-century wired world.

For a start, when you walk into the new King’s Library, you don’t know which way to turn. All around you, from floor to ceiling, are cabinets of curiosities, laid out as they would have been 250 years ago. Greek urns mingle with druidic necklets, ammonites, statues of Shiva and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Yet, just as when you browse the internet, you find that one thing leads to another.

You realise, for instance, that the technology of harnessing horses — the mechanics of a bit — has barely changed over thousands of years or across civilisations, yet the technology of warfare has improved hugely. Why? Because fighting involved competition, in which winning or losing was a matter of life and death. Riding horses was more mundane.

You also stumble upon contradictions. Once 18th-century linguists had deciphered hieroglyphics, they were able to read contemporaneous accounts of Egyptian history. What were they to make of the fact that Egyptians never mentioned Moses’s flight out of the country, or the ten plagues? Should they still believe the Bible? Or the historical evidence?

At the same time, explorers such as Captain Cook were bringing back exciting ethnographical objects. Eighteenth-century Britons discovered that gods were worshipped everywhere, in ways that were both universal and also fantastically exotic. Were they to marvel at the shared humanity? Or, in an age when the Church could split over the tiniest theological difference, were they to treat other people’s religions as impossibly unorthodox?

If the internet is a virtual encylopaedia which poses as many questions as it answers, the British Museum is a physical one. And that was just how it seemed in the 18th century, too. The bringing together of disparate collections allowed large groups of objects to be classified and ordered so that scholars could try to make sense of history, science and the natural world.

The King’s Library, even if it were empty, would be worth a visit. It has the largest, and possibly most beautiful, neo-classical interior in London. But its contents are gripping, too, for what they tell us about the history of knowledge. Go there when it opens, think yourself back into the mind of a curious citizen of 1753, look on its works — and revere.

MAGIC AND MELDREWS

At the weekend I took four children to the famous Advent Service at Salisbury Cathedral, possibly the most magical evocation of the coming of Christ in England. The service begins in pitch darkness, with even the outside floodlights extinguished. One candle is then lit at the back of the cathedral, and the choir begins ethereally to sing.

As they process towards the east end, thousands of candles are individually lit until the cathedral is ablaze with flickering light, just as it must have looked in the Middle Ages. The music is marvellous. Anglicanism doesn’t do better than this.

And yet . . . it took me until at least halfway through the service before I could dispense with my rage and appreciate the atmosphere.

In order to get seats close enough to the front for the children to be able to see the choir, I had arrived to queue two-and-a-half hours before the service began at 7pm. I also made sure that the children came to join me before 6pm, so that they could take their seats once the doors opened.

When they arrived, however, a steward insisted that we were not allowed to save places in the queue. “But they’re children!” I expostulated. “You can’t expect them to queue for an hour and a half and then wait in the church for another hour.” He did — and next year, he said, they would have to do so.

Inside the cathedral there was more indignity. Each time the children left their seats to explore the building before the service started, an even more officious steward threatened to give the chairs away to somebody else.

Do these people want to encourage us to come to church? Do they not understand the importance of bringing in a new generation? It is astonishing that a cathedral that is so good at putting on a celebration can be so bad at welcoming us to it.

maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

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