Page - 167 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

167The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame Copenhagen. These included announcements, and then a review of the book- let on magnets in 1762;93 a report on attempts made by Hell and others at heal- ing patients suffering from toothache by magnetism in 1766;94 exchanges be- tween Hell and Weiss about a comet Weiss observed in 1766, and about meteorological measurements in 1767.95 The journal and the authorities be- hind it clearly regarded it important to keep the public abreast of develop- ments in the observatory and the activities of its director. To be sure, Hell’s own judgment of his own stature dovetailed nicely with the opinion of the journalist about his “renown.” The manner of address and tone of the treatise on the moon of Venus is worth recalling here. An initial name-dropping is undoubtedly intended to locate the author in the august company of colleagues such as the “famous” (Wargentin and the French “com- et hunter,” Messier) and the “brilliant” (the geophysicist and astronomer Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan [1678–1771]), some of them identified as his “intimate friends” (Lacaille) or simply as “our father” (Joseph Louis Lagrange [Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia (1736–1813)]—actually sixteen years Hell’s junior, but already recognized as one of the greatest mathematicians of the age; “fa- ther” here refers to his status as a Jesuit), with all of whom he maintains a mutually inspiring correspondence and who have proved themselves to be a captive audience for his corrections of their research results.96 This might well create an aura of presumptuousness, were it not for the tone of elegant, subtle irony in Hell’s addressing the celebrities who are his putative interlocutors: a tone not of upstart self-assertion, but one of dignified self-confidence on the part of a scholar who is firmly aware of his status on the map of contemporary learning. For a final apparently self-congratulatory assessment, one might turn to the balance struck by Hell about the impact of the Ephemerides in the preface to its twentieth volume (1776). While this was published several years after the purview of the present chapter, the achievements Hell boasted about there were more or less in hand by the late 1760s: The present, 1776 year of these Ephemerides, is the twentieth in an unin- terrupted series published since 1757 for the use of the public by the Imperial and Royal Observatory of the University of Vienna. But what are 93 WD, no. 75 (September 18, 1762): 7; no. 79 (October 2, 1762): 9–10. 94 WD, no. 26 (March 29, 1766): 10–12. Cf. the discussion on Hell’s engagement with Franz Anton Mesmer below in Chapter 7, 357–61. 95 WD, no. 31 (April 16, 1766): 9–11; no. 4 (January 14, 1767): 7–8; no. 6 (January 21, 1767): 7–8. 96 Hell, De satellite Veneris, 13.