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, 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 in 181 ...

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

biogeography Biogeography is the study of the species distribution, distribution of species and ecosystems in geography, geographic space and through evolutionary history of life, geological time. Organisms and biological community (ecology), communities o ...

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

Nazi regime Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictat ...

. Jacobi was born in

Leipzig Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...

, 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 pioneer of parasitology research and was widely known for developing a series of illustrated wall charts for use in zo ...

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. Jacobi held the position at the museum until retirement in 1936. He 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 officially translated into English as the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State was a document presented on 11 November 1933 at the Albert Hall in Leipzi ...

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 in Outer Plauen Cemetery.

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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