Page - 128 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 2128 he had until then considered a friend, he added) should steal the theory and publish it under his own name, the members of the Parisian academy would be in a position to detect this fraud and protect Hell’s honor as the true inventor of the theory. Lacaille passed away less than a year later, and his correspon- dence soon found its way to other people’s hands. This was apparently how it came about that Hell’s theory circulated throughout Europe for years to come, but also without meeting much acclaim. Thus, instead of a means to protect his own honor, Hell’s confident letter to Lacaille served as the exact opposite. It is noteworthy, especially in view of later developments discussed in Chap- ter 7, that several of Hell’s young protégés at the observatory originated from the Hungarian part of the Habsburg monarchy. First and foremost, there was János Sajnovics, already mentioned briefly above,105 from a relatively well-to- do noble family of Croat ethnic origin, but in his own words “born and raised in Hungary by Hungarian parents” in the village of Tordas near Székesfehérvár (Alba Regia, Stuhlweißenburg).106 Like Liesganig, he was merely fifteen when he entered the Society of Jesus in 1748. Having lost both of his parents by then, upon entering the Society he also relinquished the Sajnovics estate to his older brother Matthias as sole heir. He stayed in Trenčín as a novice and received his undergraduate schooling in Győr and Buda, before moving to Trnava to study at the philosophical faculty in 1752–54. One of his university teachers was György (Georg) Pray (1723–1801), who was later to become a leading historian in Hungary, and Weiss probably taught him as well. Sajnovics himself went on to teach grammar in Bratislava until 1757, when he moved to Vienna to serve as Hell’s assistant (bidellus) for three years. His tasks appear to have included sec- retarial ones: a comparison with the handwriting of the travel diary from the “Theoria phœnomeni ascensus, et descensus Mercurij in barometris,” addressed to the Académie Royale des Sciences but possibly never submitted to Paris. However, in a letter to Röhl in Greifswald, dated Berlin, September 16, 1772, Johann Heinrich Lambert ridi- cules Hell’s meteorological theories, which he had the opportunity to read through. See Joh. Heinrich Lamberts […] deutscher gelehrter Briefwechsel, ed. Johann iii Bernoulli, 5 vols. (Berlin: Der Herausgeber, Dessau: Buchhandlung der Gelehrten, 1781–87), 2:397–400. As late as 1786, a thirty-page long “Frank Reflections on the Meteorological Theory of Herr Hell” was issued; see Prof. Dätzl [Georg Anton Däzel], Freymüthige Gedanken über die Wit- terungslehre des Herrn Hells (Salzburg: Waisenhausbuchhandlung, 1786). 105 See 65, 75. For key information on Sajnovics’s early career, see Emil Kisbán, Johann Sajno- vics: Leben und Werk eines ungarischen Bahnbrechers und Gelehrten (Budapest: Hungária, 1943); József Erdődi, “Sajnovics, der Mensch und der Gelehrte,” Acta linguistica academiae Hungaricae 20 (1970): 291–322. See also the Jesuit catalogs Austria: Catalogi breves 1763– 1765 and 1766–1769. 106 János Sajnovics, Demonstratio: Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse (Copenhagen: Giese, 1770), [x].