Seite - 131 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

131Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science town on the scientific map of the imperial and royal space he officially repre- sented. These efforts needed a good decade to bear some fruit. As yet, those spaces—the second tier of concentric circles around Hell’s Vienna—boasted new observatories in Graz, Trnava, and Kremsmünster.115 Mid-eighteenth- century developments at these observatories have already been outlined ear- lier via the portraits of some of their protagonists: Scherffer, Poda, Weiss, and Fixlmillner, of whom the first three were connected with Hell during his for- mative years and remained in more or less constant touch with him after his Viennese appointment. Besides them, Joseph Mayr (1720–?), who briefly di- rected the Graz observatory before Poda, merits attention on account of a sin- gle surviving letter by him to Hell, giving an insight into the dynamics within the astronomical community of the Habsburg monarchy. Little can be ascertained about Mayr,116 except that he was born in Passau, entered the Society of Jesus in 1736, studied at the universities of Vienna and Graz, and was appointed as professor of mathematics and prefect of the astro- nomical observatory in Graz in 1755 (i.e., at around the same time as Hell). Mayr still retained this position when Hell issued the first volume of his Ephe- merides, which he personally distributed to colleagues all over the Austrian province and beyond. Mayr was grateful for his copy, and excused himself for the delay in acknowledging it, stressing that I have used them faithfully in this my worn and all but dilapidated obser- vatory, insofar as it was possible, given my [limited] experience in astro- nomical matters. If only the fellow who, after the death of pious Vanos- sius, got the task of delivering two practical lessons every week assigned for himself, back in those days when we as colleagues learned the basics of mathematics, had given us at least some instruction [in astronomy]!117 Recalling the time they spent together completing the philosophy curriculum in Vienna,118 Mayr complained to Hell that after the loss of a teacher (whose identity could not be established from the sources), there was no one at hand who might have introduced them to the field he was now supposed to supervise 115 Prague, with its traditions going back to Kepler and the astronomical tower in the Clem- entinum deriving from 1722, is a somewhat separate case. See Zdislav Šíma, Astronomie a Klementinum/Astronomy and Clementinum (Prague: Národní knihovna České republiky, 2006). 116 Fischer, “Jesuiten-Mathematiker in der Deutschen Assistenz,” 208. 117 Joseph Mayr to Hell in Vienna, dated Graz, October 17, 1757 (wus, copy in the hand of Hell’s secretary). 118 Mayr was in his second year when Hell began in 1741. Lukács, Catalogi personarum, 8:465.