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Chapter
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with fellow astronomers in Sweden and England in this period. Not surpris-
ingly, Lalande received news from all over the world in the weeks and
months after June 3, 1769. Thus, thanks to his close contacts with astrono-
mers on the other side of the Channel, Lalande received all British observa-
tions and summarized them in the Journal des Sçavans long before they
were printed in the Philosophical Transactions.58 Similarly, the Imperial Rus-
sian Academy extracted the Venus transit observations from the expedition
diaries of its observers, printed them immediately, and sent them to La lande.
And by mutual agreement, its secretary—Johann Albrecht (Jean Albert)
Euler (1734–1800)— receiv
ed news of French and British observations from
Lalande in return.59 Fur
thermore, Wargentin in Stockholm summarized all
Swedish (including Finnish) observations in letters to Lalande soon after the
transit had taken place.60
However, no comparable agreement existed between Lalande and the Royal
Society of Sciences in Copenhagen—quite the contrary, in fact. Hell’s refusal to
share his observations with anyone else, as explained in his letter to Wargentin
quoted above, evidently included the academicians of Paris. Despite Hell’s sta-
tus as a corresponding member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, with
none other than Lalande as his personal contact, no details whatsoever were
revealed to Lalande or his confrères until a copy of Hell’s Observatio transitus
Veneris […] 1769 finally reached Paris on March 4, 1770, exactly nine months
after the transit had taken place.61 By that time, Lalande had received reports
from all over Europe, and even from Hudson’s Bay in present-day Canada. The
only crucial observations he lacked were a couple of Siberian observations by
Georg Moritz Lowitz (1722–74) and Ivan Islen’ev (1738–84) (published in French
58 See JS (September 1769): 644–45; (December 1769): 835–36; (April 1770): 227–28; (Decem-
ber 1771): 825–26 (the last being a “letter to the editors” dated September 13, 1771, in which
he explains that he had received the Tahiti observations of Cook’s team two days earlier).
For an analysis of Lalande’s contacts with British astronomers, see Danielle M.E. Fauque,
“La correspondance Jérôme Lalande et Nevil Maskelyne: Un exemple de collaboration
internationale au xviiie siècle,” in Boistel et al., Jérôme Lalande, 109–28.
59 Johann Albrecht Euler to Lalande in Paris, dated St. Petersburg, May 14/26, 1769, and Sep-
tember 8/19, 1769 (ran); Lalande to Johann Albrecht Euler in St. Petersburg, dated Bourg-
en-Bresse, July 26, 1769, and Paris, January 12, 1770 (ran).
60 Wargentin is known to have sent letters to Lalande in Paris, dated June 9 and July 11, 1769
(see the list of outgoing correspondence in Nordenmark, Wargentin, 399–424, here 406).
It is probably the contents of these letters that appeared in Lalande’s “Lettre sur le passage
de Vénus; Adressée à Messieurs les auteurs du Journal des Sçavans,” published September
1769, 645.
61 According to Hell, “De parallaxi Solis,” 92.
Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Titel
- Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
- Untertitel
- And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Autoren
- Per Pippin Aspaas
- László Kontler
- Verlag
- Brill
- Ort
- Leiden
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-90-04-41683-3
- Abmessungen
- 15.5 x 24.1 cm
- Seiten
- 492
- Kategorien
- Naturwissenschaften Physik
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Acknowledgments VII
- List of Illustrations IX
- Bibliographic Abbreviations X
- Introduction 1
- 1 Shafts and Stars, Crafts and Sciences: The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces 37
- 2 Metropolitan Lures: Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science 91
- 3 A New Node of Science in Action: The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame 134
- 4 The North Beckons: “A desperate voyage by desperate persons” 172
- 5 He Came, He Saw, He Conquered? The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum 209
- 6 “Tahiti and Vardø will be the two columns […]”: Observing Venus andDebating the Parallax 258
- 7 Disruption of Old Structures 305
- 8 Coping with Enlightenments 344
- Appendix 1 Map of the Austrian Province of the Society of Jesus (with Glossary of Geographic Names) 394
- Appendix 2 Instruction for the Imperial and Royal Astronomer Maximilian Hell, S.J 398
- Bibliography 400
- Index 459