Page - 151 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

151The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame source). A brief, less than half-page mention of the Jesuit philosophy and mathematics professor Berthold Hauser (1713–62) in Dillingen is then included (source not given), followed by less than a page on Tobias Mayer in Göttingen and the Dresden amateur Christian Gotthold Hoffmann (1713–78), respectively. Finally, half a page on the Jesuit Johann Baptist Schöttl (1724–?) in Ljubljana rounds off the account of “German” observations of the 1761 transit. Or not quite: Hell also mentions that the Jesuit father Stepling in Bohemian Prague has seen nothing due to clouds. The message is again clear. Jesuit and Catholic observers from Germania have been found worthy of a good twenty pages, in- cluding some cases when they have not seen anything whatsoever, whereas observers of other creeds—even someone as famous as Tobias Mayer—are hardly noticed. A curious omission from the report is the university observa- tory of Graz, with which relations of the Jesuit astronomers of Vienna were lukewarm. Another omission is the high-standard observatory of the Benedic- tines at Kremsmünster, where the transit was indeed observed.39 The absence of Graz and Kremsmünster in the report does not spoil the general picture, however. Much of the material forming the basis of Hell’s report has been found among his surviving manuscripts in Vienna. Included there is a fine original drawing of the path of Venus across the Sun’s disc as observed by Hoffmann, a Lutheran finance officer in Dresden. Hoffmann was an enthusiast of natural inquiry, with an avid interest in botany, geology, and meteorology; nor was he ignorant of astronomy, having also observed Halley’s Comet in 1759. In his po- lite, less-than-one-page mention of Hoffmann in the printed report, Hell de- scribes him as “a man already famous, thanks to other observations made in the same city” and characterized by “a singular friendliness toward men of learning.” However, the account is soon cut short by the remark that in Dres- den “the egress could not be exactly observed due to clouds.”40 Curiously, there is no mention of clouds in the illustrated manuscript in Hoffmann’s own hand, which is preserved among Hell’s manuscripts.41 Even the exact moment of in- terior contact at egress is recorded. Perhaps the account of bad weather was 39 According to the website www.transitofvenus.nl/history.html edited by Steven van Roode (accessed via the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org [June 1, 2019]), Fixlmillner’s predecessor Eugen Dobler observed the transit “accompanied by prelate Bertholdi and other clergymen.” As for Graz, the Ephemerides did not publish observation results from there regularly until 1767. Before then, the only instance was a report on a lunar eclipse of March 17, 1764 by Poda’s successor Karl Tirnberger (1732–80), prefect of the Graz observa- tory from 1764 to 1771. 40 Hell, “Observatio transitus Veneris […] 1761,” 82–83. 41 wus.