Jerome Necsey

* Oszlány, February 24, 1788 – † Privigye, June 4, 1849 / Piarist priest, naturalist diver, teacher ; ; He entered the religious order in Privigye, where he was ordained a priest in 1814. He studied at various Piarist schools (Privigye, Nyitra, Nagykároly, Vác). In 1829/1830, he taught grammar, philosophy and poetry at the Piarist high schools in Kisszeben, Podolini and Privigye. He also dealt with natural sciences: he drew general geographical maps, constructed a globe, conducted electrical experiments, compiled astronomical tables, and in Privigye he constructed a clock that showed not only the exact time, but also the date (day, month) and the positions of the celestial bodies. Several of his manuscripts, written in beautiful calligraphic letters, have survived, but none of them have been published. He compiled a “hundred-year” calendar covering the years 1815–1912. He wrote Latin, German, Hungarian and Slovak grammars and a German–Hungarian dictionary. He compiled a handbook on religious doctrine, ethics, civil law and church history. He processed the most important events of 1814–1815. A list of various German, Hungarian, Latin and Slovak manuscripts he collected between 1809–1819 has also survived. His most extensive and interesting work is a nine-volume general encyclopedia, which he compiled from the works of various authors written in 1839–1841. It contains 7,107 headings classified into 26 topics on about 6,500 pages. The data on the towns of the Highlands are valuable. He summarized the discovery of America in Latin, following Spanish authors. In 1815 he compiled a geographical manual, in 1829 an elementary arithmetic book, and a botanical work containing more than 300 colored plant illustrations.