192 Heilbron
before greater powers newly bent on obtaining effi cient control of their re-
sources. Their order remained alive, however, in the most absolute states,
Prussia and Russia, and was resurrected as part of the restoration of the
ancien régime in 1814–1815. The offi cial nonexistence of the Jesuits thus
agreed perfectly in time with the development of exact natural philoso-
phy and its deployment by the European states. The sort of technical work
done by Boscovich and Ximenes was continued and expanded, but not
by Jesuits.
On the other end of the scale of organization, ubiquitous indepen-
dent abbés became important actors in natural philosophy. Some of them
priests, others only deacons, they owed their access to the Republic of
Letters to the education they received, and often also to the contacts they
made, in the church. Four have entered this account so far: Nollet, the
experimental philosopher, instrument maker, and showman of the old
school, who died in the epochal year 1770; his successor, Pilâtre de Rozier,
killed in a natural- philosophical stunt in 1785; Casanova, who retired
from the world in 1785 to write his memoirs; and Bossut, professor of
exact science to engineers, a former student of the Jesuits who lived just
long enough to see the society reborn in 1814.
Among the many other abbés who helped advance natural philosophy
was François Rozier. He began with scientifi c agriculture and found his
vocation in publishing. His Observations (later Journal) de physique, which
started in 1771, at fi rst admitted most of physics in its old sense, includ-
ing chemistry, meteorology, mineralogy, anatomy, physiology, zoology,
agriculture, and the mechanical arts, usually in the form of experimental
philosophy, not natural history. Rozier excluded mathematics, including
its usual applications. It is therefore particularly instructive to follow the
gradual restriction in subject matter, and the increasing frequency of mea-
surements, in the Journal. During the 1790s, Deluc was one of its primary
contributors. His mixture of accuracy in observation and precision in
measurement with qualitative speculations worthy of Baron Munchausen
represent much of exact natural philosophy almost exactly. After a decade
editing the Journal de physique, which put out twice as many pages a year
as the memoirs of the Paris Academy of Sciences, Rozier handed it over to
his nephew, another abbé, who continued its policy of fast publication of
experimental results and helped to bring it closer to the emerging consen-
sus about the nature of natural philosophy.^49
The welter of German states and principalities, which abounded in
universities and bureaucracies, and, after the Seven Years’ War, in problems
of reconstruction, provided a theater for a special combination of eco-
nomic rationalization and natural knowledge. This combination, known