Page - 289 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

289Observing Venus and Debating the Parallax attack on Lalande. As Hell wrote in one of his letters accompanying the mono- graph (to Wargentin, dated Vienna, July 15, 1772): If my style, so untypical of me until now, seems a little over-aggressive to you, I would like you to consider the unheard-of, and totally unfounded, accusation of having made up or altered the data, that has been put for- ward by Monsieur Lalande against my person (who did not exactly start my career in astronomy yesterday); this would actually have deserved a much stronger response. In more than one letter, I have advised Lalande to abstain from defending the Cajaneborg observation and cease attack- ing the one from Vardø, but in response to my friendly, even privately communicated advice, he has decided to brand me in public, an act I deemed I should certainly not pass by in silence.95 Hell’s confession to “over-aggression” may seem to corroborate another charge sometimes leveled against him in the literature—not just a tendency to lose his temper, but even to resort to questionable means in the heat of the debate. He is alleged to have “used all kinds of tricks; erroneous calculations, wrong longitude determinations, and incorrect parallax effects.”96 To put this in con- text, one might add immediately that Lexell voiced exactly the same criticism against Hell, Planman, and Lalande alike. Even Hell’s insistence that Lalande must have been led more by his personal ambition than by a quest to find the truth is echoed by Lexell. In January 1770, when Lalande published his first in a series of calculations of the parallax based on the observations of 1769, another correspondent of Wargentin’s in Paris remarked that “the merit of this savant, however huge in itself, would have been doubled if only he had been less in- imical to the merit of others.”97 Hell was probably neither better nor worse than any in this charged contest of heavy egos. In the De parallaxi Solis, Hell blames Lalande for having shown too much of that arrogance characterizing representatives of great powers. Lalande, he ar- gues, must clearly have felt dismayed that neither Hell nor the court in Copen- hagen asked for his advice in the planning of the Vardø expedition. Besides, he and his French colleagues were obviously offended that Hell did not dispatch an extract of his observation journal in manuscript directly to Paris, “as to a tribunal of astronomy” (tamquam ad Tribunal astronomicum), with the first express mail possible. Hence, when the report finally arrived, they judged that 95 Hell to Wargentin, dated Vienna, July 15, 1772 (cvh). 96 Kragemo, “Pater Hells Vardøhusekspedisjon,” 121–22. 97 François Charles de Baër to Wargentin, dated Paris, January 18, 1770 (cvh).