Arnold Friedrich Victor Jacobi (31 January 1870 – 16 June 1948) was a German zoologist and ethnologist who worked at the Forest Academy in

Tharandt Tharandt () is a municipality in Saxony, Germany, situated on the Weißeritz, 9 miles southwest of Dresden. It has a Protestant Church and the oldest academy of forestry in Germany, founded as the Royal Saxon Academy of Forestry by Heinrich Cotta ...

and later served as director of the Dresden Museum. He studied

biogeography Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, ...

, described numerous taxa of molluscs, cicadas and wrote on birds and mammals. He was a supporter of the

Nazi regime Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

. Jacobi was born in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

where his father Victor was a professor of philosophy. His mother Flora was the daughter of a Pastor Heiner. He received his schooling at the Thomasschule in Leipzig and took an interest in zoology studying under

Rudolf Leuckart Karl Georg Friedrich Rudolf Leuckart (7 October 1822 – 22 February 1898) was a German zoologist born in Helmstedt. He was a nephew to naturalist Friedrich Sigismund Leuckart (1794–1843). Academic career He earned his degree from the Uni ...

and William Marshall as well as in geography, ethnography and anthropology. He also took an interest in Arabic and Russian languages. He received his doctorate on Malay land snails in 1895 after which he became a school teacher in Leipzig and later Stollberg. He became a scientific assistant in the health department in Berlin and then moved to a chair in zoology at the Forest Academy in Tharandt, succeeding H. Nitsche, becoming a full professor in 1904. In 1906 he was appointed to the Dresden museum as director to replace A. B. Meyer who was forced to resign partly on account of his Jewish origin. He held the position at the museum until retirement in 1936. Jacobi joined expeditions to Lapland in 1908 and the Kanin peninsula in 1913. He collected and described numerous taxa of insects (particularly the cicadas), birds and other groups while also taking an interest in biogeography. Jacobi signed the

Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State Bekenntnis der Professoren an den Universitäten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat officially translated into English as the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Ad ...

in 1933 but there is no evidence that he became a party member. Jacobi married Olga née Dolberg in 1902 and they had four children. Olga died in 1931 and in 1941 Jacobi married schoolteacher Hildegard née Bösch (1890-1965). Jacobi died in Dresden and is buried Outer Plauen Cemetery.

References

External links

Portrait

Mimikry und verwandte erscheinungen
(1913) {{DEFAULTSORT:Jacobi, Arnold 1870 births 1948 deaths 19th-century German zoologists German entomologists German ornithologists 20th-century German zoologists