Page - 368 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 8368 around the world, followed by Hell’s treatise on the parallax. The trend contin- ued for the following two years as well. Instead of observation reports, in 1774 we still find supplements to Hell’s dissertation on the solar parallax (Lexell’s long letter from St. Petersburg, and a shorter treatise by Pilgram on the subject),88 and in 1775, two treatises by Hell (an article on the diameter of the moon alongside the method of calculation of latitudes).89 Reports on astronomical observations appear again in a respectable num- ber in the Ephemerides from 1776 onward, but the coverage is conspicuously different from pre-1768 times. It embraces in an apparently haphazard manner a few locations from Central Europe, broadly speaking (besides Vienna, only Kremsmünster, Ingolstadt, and Greifswald), from Copenhagen, and exotic places: Beijing (observations by the Jesuit fathers Augustin von Hallerstein, José da Espinha [1722–88], and José Bernardo de Almeida [1728–1805])90 and “Western Tartary” (Felix da Rocha [1713–81]). The year 1777 was especially re- markable in the “regional turn” of the Ephemerides (that is, the shifting geo- graphic distribution of source locations). In that year, as mentioned, the only university operating in the Kingdom of Hungary was moved from Trnava to Buda, where an astronomical tower was created too, similarly to the town of Eger, where a new observatory was being mounted in the local lyceum. Hell was assigned to supervise and advise the building and equipment of both of these new observatories. In 1776—as reported in great detail in the Ephemeri­ des for 1777—Hell completed an astronomical journey in Hungary. From this time on, the yield of observation activity in the metropolitan centers of Euro- pean science—in France, in England, in Italy (let us remember the comment on the Berlin Jahrbuch in the Journal des Sçavans) are, by and large, missing from the Ephemerides. The space beyond the astronomical tables is quite consistently and overwhelmingly filled, apart from the sporadic appearance of Paris, Milan, and Greenwich in the observation reports, with accounts from the northern, eastern, and central crescent around the European core, as well as contributions of Hell’s colleagues (especially Pilgram), and Hell himself. 88 The texts by Hell and Lexell were mentioned and discussed above. The additional item is “De parallaxi Solis ex duobus internis contactibus Veneris, in eodem loco observatis dis- quisitio. à P. Antonio Pilgram S.J. anno 1772” (140–55). There is also an “Appendicula à P. Hell, itemque solution ultimissimi problematis à R.P. Hallerstein Pekini Sinarum Man- darino” (155–62). 89 “Methodus accurata, ope solius tubi micrometrum instructi, praecisam definire elevatio- nem poli”; “Dissertatio, de vera magnitudine apparente diametri Lunae plenae oculo inermi visae,” Ephemerides 1775 (1774), 3–41; 42–53. 90 Hell also mentions in their company a certain “Cibolla,” whom we have been unable to identify.