great Jesuit astronomers and mathematicians Clavius, Kircher, Riccioli, Scheiner, Grimaldi, and a precursor of the famous Father Secchi, one of the greatest astronomers, at least in spectroscopy, of the nineteenth century.
Lalande, in his Bibliographie Astronomique, enumerates forty-five Jesuit astronomers and eighty-nine astronomical publications for the short period of 1750-1773. The same author, in the continuation of Montucla's History of Mathematics, pays the following tribute to the Society: "Here I must remark to the honor of this learned and cruelly persecuted Society, that in several colleges it possessed observatories, for instance in Marseilles, Avignon, Lyons, etc." There were other observatories in Rome, Florence, Milan, in fact in every country where Jesuits had colleges. Of Germany and Austria, Lalande remarks: "There were in Germany and the neighboring countries few large colleges of the Society which had no observatory." He mentions those of Vienna, Tyrnau, Ingolstadt, Graz, Breslau, Olmiitz, Prague, etc., and speaks highly of the scientific work done by the Jesuit astronomers. He adds that after the "deplorable catastrophe of the Society," most of these observatories shared the fate of the Order.[1]
Quite recently Professor Günther of Munich[2] called
- ↑ Histoire des Mathématiques, par J. F. Montucla, tome IV, achevé et publié par Jérôme de la Lande, Paris, 1802, pp. 347 foll.
- ↑ Bibliotheca Mathematica, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der mathematischen Wissenschaften, 3. Folge, 3. Band, Heft, 1902 (Leipzig, Teubner), pp. 208-225.
different from those of other astronomers, but that recent discoveries have proved the Jesuit's observations to have been the more correct ones.
