Seite - 294 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 6294 uncertainties.”119 A rapid exchange of letters between Hell and Lexell in the winter of 1772–73 also ended in a sort of reconciliation. Hell in fact took the liberty of publishing one of Lexell’s letters in his Ephemerides, but added to almost every sentence such long and intricate footnotes that, in effect, the voice of Lexell was almost drowned.120 Remarkably, Hell recognized that he had committed several errors in the calculations of the De parallaxi Solis ( although he blamed the printer for a number of the mistakes), but refused to alter his initial conclusion: the parallax, he maintained, was still nothing short of 8.70″, or 8.70″ ±0.03″ at the most.121 Simultaneously, Pingré was busy presenting a series of lectures to the Aca- démie des Sciences, where he concluded that the solar parallax had to be 8.80″, “quite accurately” (à très-peu-près).122 The approach of Pingré was more open- minded than that of Hell or Lalande. The only thing he rejected was the exte- rior contact of egress as observed in Cajaneborg; Planman’s ingress data could still be used, he argued. As for Tahiti, Pingré upon investigation found that the observation of Green had to be left out; the same he did with Borchgrevink’s data from Vardø. He even tested thoroughly Rumovskii’s observation from Kola, something Lalande, Lexell, and Planman had all neglected.123 Lalande was upset but felt confident that he would be able to make a fool of Pingré, as he said in a letter to Wargentin.124 Hell, on the other hand, felt an enormous relief. The difference between their conclusions—8.80″ instead of 8.70″—he found to originate from Pingré’s use of Cook’s observation rather than that of Green. But this was hardly any offense: the Jesuit father found that his credibil- ity had been restored and the notorious egress data from Cajaneborg had been rejected from the calculations.125 119 JS (February 1773): 115. 120 Letter from Lexell to Hell in Vienna, dated St. Petersburg, February 22, 1773, printed in the “Supplementum dissertationis de parallaxi Solis,” Ephemerides 1774 (1773): 1–162, here 15–68. 121 Hell, “Supplementum dissertationis de parallaxi Solis,” 62. It must be added that after hav- ing seen Hell’s “Supplementum,” on December 24, 1775 Lexell wrote about it with bitter irony to Bernoulli—“I found it to be just as I imagined and even worse”—and reproached the Swiss sage for “the remarkable contrast between your conduct towards me and father Hell.” Cited in Stén, Comet of the Enlightenment, 76–77. 122 Pingré, “Mémoire sur la parallaxe du Soleil, déduite des meilleurs observations de la durée du passage de Vénus sur son disque le 3 Juin 1769,” hars (1775): 419. 123 Hell had, it is true, presented a brief investigation of Rumovskii’s observation and con- cluded that it gave a parallax of 8.73″, but without putting much weight on this; cf. Hell, “De parallaxi Solis,” 80–84. 124 Lalande to Wargentin in Stockholm, dated Paris, January 5, 1773 (cvh). 125 Hell to Weiss in Trnava, dated Vienna, April 6, 1773, in Pinzger, Hell Miksa, 2:114–17.