any sound authority for this statement.
What is of some interest is that he published a determination of the
parallax of the sun based on the comparison of his own observations
with those made at other stations. The result was 8".70. It was then,
and long after, supposed that the actual value of the parallax was
about 8".50, and the deviation of Hell's result from this was
considered to strengthen the doubt as to the correctness of his work.
It is of interest to learn that, by the most recent researches, the
number in question must be between 8".75 and 8".80, so that in reality
Hell's computations came nearer the truth than those generally current
during the century following his work.

Thus the matter stood for sixty years after the transit, and for a
generation after Father Hell had gone to his rest. About 1830 it was
found that the original journal of his voyage, containing the record of
his work as first written down at the station, was still preserved at
the Vienna Observatory. Littrow, then an astronomer at Vienna, made a
critical examination of this record in order to determine whether it
had been tampered with. His conclusions were published in a little book
giving a transcript of the journal, a facsimile of the most important
entries, and a very critical description of the supposed alterations
made in them. He reported in substance that the original record had
been so tampered with that it was impossible to decide whether the
observations as published were genuine or not. The vital figures, those
which told the times when Venus entered upon the sun, had been erased,
and rewritten with blacker ink. This might well have been done after
the party returned to Copenhagen. The case against the observer seemed
so well made out that professors of astronomy gave their hearers a
lesson in the value of truthfulness, by telling them how Father Hell
had destroyed what might have been very good observations by trying to
make them appear better than they really were.

In 1883 I paid a visit to Vienna for the purpose of examining the great
telescope which had just been mounted in the observatory there by
Grubb, of Dublin. The weather was so unfavorable that it was necessary
to remain two weeks, waiting for an opportunity to see the stars. One
evening I visited the theatre to see Edwin Booth, in his celebrated
tour over the Continent, play King Lear to the applauding Viennese. But
evening amusements cannot be utilized to kill