Adalbert Seitz

Adalbert Seitz full name Friedrich Joseph Adalbert Seitz (24 February 1860 in Mainz – 5 March 1938 in Darmstadt) was a German entomologist who specialised in Lepidoptera.

Early in his career he studied butterflies in Brazil, and was later a Director of the Frankfurt Zoo.

He was the editor of Die Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde (The Macrolepidoptera of the World). This is a sixteen volume work with four supplements published in German, French, and English. For details see Griffin, F. J. (1936). The first four volumes describe the Palaearctic fauna and volumes 5–16 describe the exotic Fauna (Volumes 1–4, Palaearctic Fauna, with 4 supplements;Volumes 5–8, American Fauna;Volumes 9–12, Indo-Australian Fauna;Volumes 13–16, African Fauna) . The coloured plates were made by 10–14 colour lithography. Seitz planned to finish the whole work in 1912, but this proved to be quite unrealistic and publication stopped in 1954. Several volumes remain unfinished.

Consulted collections of butterflies include those of Walter Rothschild, the British Museum, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris, the Senckenberg Museum at Frankfurt, as well as collections in Tokyo, Hong-Kong, Australia, South America, and North America.

His private collection is conserved in Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Senckenberg.

"The idea of a work for the identification of all the known Macrolepidoptera originate a during an excursion which the editor made in Australia in the company of the late William McLeay. The suggestion put forward by this naturalist found further support in the following year in a consultation with Emilio A. Goeldi, the then director of the Zoological Museum at Rio de Janeiro, which induced me to enter into communication with Dr. O. Staudinger in order to confer with him ahout the feasibility of an extension, suiting the requirements of all collectors in foreign countries, of his work on Exotic Lepidoptera, which was in the course of publication.

...
Wikipedia