Page - 295 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

295Observing Venus and Debating the Parallax At least publicly, Lalande appears to have carried no more logs to the fire. And after publishing his bulky Supplementum to the memoir De parallaxi Solis in the autumn of 1773, Hell too withdrew from the debate. Planman published an apology against this last work of Hell in 1774. He there argued for a probable parallax of 8.40″, but the article appears not to have been widely disseminat- ed.126 Lexell groaned to Wargentin that the Jesuit could only have had two rea- sons for publishing a private letter of his in the Supplementum, the first being a desire to defend his conclusion of 8.70″ for the parallax, and the second, a de- sire to hurt Lexell’s reputation. Lexell explained that he too planned to publish another apology against Hell, “if the academy agrees to its publication,” but this plan appears to have come to nothing.127 The strife ended there, with parallaxes ranging from 8.40″ (Planman) to 8.80″ (Pingré). Hell’s abilities as an observer and calculator were brought into question, and by the time the debate subsided in the mid-1770s, he was an ex- Jesuit. To what extent did religious antagonism play a role in the controversy? The debates following his Venus transit observation of 1769 have been de- scribed as “symptomatic of the highly charged feelings the Jesuits elicited on the eve of the dissolution of the Order.”128 The biographer of Hell’s successor as director at the Vienna Observatory even suggests that Lalande as an atheist was a personal enemy of the Jesuits, “aggressively waging war against them.”129 Elsewhere, we also read of “the unfair suspicion of a notorious atheist against a priest with a predestined name.”130 These characterizations are hard to corroborate. Lalande helped the Jesuit Christian Mayer go to St. Petersburg for the same purpose as Hell had trav- eled  to Norway, and he cultivated a close friendship with Father Boscovich throughout the dispute with his confrère in Vienna. Lalande, himself a pupil of the Jesuits, is in fact known to have deplored the abolition of their “illustrious society.”131 Admittedly, in letters to Wargentin written in the heat of the  moment Lexell did not hesitate to dismiss the arguments of his Viennese counterpart as 126 Planman, “Förklaring På de Formler.” 127 Lexell to Wargentin in Stockholm, dated St. Petersburg, June 11/22, 1774 (cvh). 128 Mordechai Feingold, “Jesuits: Savants,” in Feingold, Jesuit Science and the Republic of Let- ters, 1–46, here 1. 129 Kastner-Masilko, Triesnecker, 48. 130 Jean-Claude Pecker, “L’oeuvre scientifique de Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande (1732– 1807),” Les nouvelles annales de l’ain (1985): 1–31, here 19. It should be mentioned that Pecker later revised his opinion on the quarrel between Lalande and Hell; cf. Pecker, “Jérôme de Lalande and International Cooperation.” 131 See, e.g., Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 109.