Erik Nordenskiöld (November 23, 1872 – April 28, 1933) was a Finnish-Swedish aristocrat, zoologist and historian of science. He was the nephew of the explorer

Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (; 18 November 183212 August 1901) was a Finland-Swedish aristocrat, geologist, mineralogist and Arctic explorer. He was a member of the noble Nordenskiöld family of scientists and held the title of a friherre (ba ...

(1832-1901) and was best known for his work on arachnids and a pioneering work on the history of biology.

Life and work

Nordenskiöld was born in the Frugård manor in

Mäntsälä Mäntsälä () is a municipality in the province of Southern Finland, and is part of the Uusimaa region. It has a population of () and covers an area of of which is water. The population density is . The municipality is unilingually Finni ...

, Uusimaa, in a family of scholars. His grandfather had been a mineralogist and his uncle was the explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832-1901) while his father was a well known agriculturist. The family library and cabinet of curiosities was considered among the richest in Finland. He studied geology and zoology at the Alexander University of Helsinki from 1890. His first work was on the origin of the earth in 1892. A member of the Societas pro Fauna et Flora Fennica, he published on the water mites of the region from 1894 to 1913. He also published a dissertation in 1898 on the morphology and evolution of the Hydrachnids. He also worked on the anatomy of the ''Ixodes''. He travelled in 1897 to Padua to worked with the arachnologist

Giovanni Canestrini Giovanni Canestrini (26 December 1835 – 14 February 1900) was an Italian naturalist and biologist and translator who was a native of Revò. Career He initially studied in Gorizia and Meran, then furthered his education in natural sciences at t ...

and in Leipzig under

Rudolf Leuckart Karl Georg Friedrich Rudolf Leuckart (7 October 1822 – 22 February 1898) was a German zoologist born in Helmstedt. He was a pioneer of parasitology research and was widely known for developing a series of illustrated wall charts for use in zo ...

. He also worked in Stockholm with Emil Holmgren (1906) and spent some time at the research stations in Banyuls-sur-Mer and at Nancy. After receiving a doctorate in 1899 he became a lecturer at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki and taught on invertebrates, parasites and histology. In 1916-17 he began a series on the history of zoology. He had married a Swede in 1906 and in 1917 he moved to Sweden, becoming a citizen in 1926. He taught at a high school in Stockholm. He published a paper on the musculature of butterflies in 1920. His most major work on the history of biology was published in three volumes from 1920 to 1924 in Swedish as ''Biologins Historia''. This was translated into German in 1926 and an English edition was produced in 1929.

George Sarton George Alfred Leon Sarton (; 31 August 1884 – 22 March 1956) was a Belgian-American chemist and historian. He is considered the founder of the discipline of the history of science as an independent field of study. His most influential works were ...

noted it as a major advance from the work of Emanuel Radl which Sarton considered as being too subjective. Sarton wrote appreciatively on the work but noted a lack of detail on the Middle Ages, chronological errors, and a lack of a historian's outlook. He died following a surgery at the age of sixty.

References

External links

The history of biology : a survey
(1935) {{DEFAULTSORT:Nordenskiold, Erik 1872 births 1933 deaths People from Mäntsälä Finnish zoologists 19th-century Swedish zoologists University of Helsinki alumni