Édouard Ménétries (Paris, France, 2 October 1802 – St. Petersburg, Imperial Russia, 10 April 1861) was a French entomologist, zoologist, and herpetologist.
Langsdorff to Brazil where he acquired vast experience of field research and wrote a number of papers on zoology.
After returning from Brazil he was invited to St Petersburg, where he arrived in 1826 and was enrolled on the staff of the Kunstkammer in the position of curator of the zoological collections.
That academic expedition was organized on the initiative of General Emmanuel, member of the Academy, who was the army commander in the Caucasus.
Through Moscow, Rostov, and Stavropol participants of the expedition arrived at the fortification Kamennyi Most on the Malka River, where the staff of General Emmanuel was situated.
Under the protection of 650 soldiers, 350 Cossacks and two cannons, the party moved to Elbrus and made a camp at the foot of the mountain.
When they reached an altitude of 4700 m the sun had risen and the snow cover partly melted, which made further expedition impossible.
There the participants received academic instruction according to which Lenz, Meier, and Menetries were to continue their trip for studying the Caspian coast up to the Persian boundary.
On 27 April (9 May) Menetries and Meier moved from Baku southwards through Salyany, the southern part of Mugan steppe, and the coast of Kyzyl-Agach Bay.
They examined lowland and foothill forests with extremely interesting fauna and flora and then made a month-long trip to the mountains near Zuvand Depression, where they collected abundant entomological materials.
When they returned to Lenkoran at the end of June, a cholera epidemic raged through the city and they quickly moved to Baku and then to Kuba from where they climbed the slopes of the mountains Shahdagh and Beshbarmak up to the subalpine zone.
In 1831 Menetries published "The Annotated Catalogue of Zoological Objects Collected during the Journey to the Caucasus to the Boundaries with Persia".
The collections were exhibited in cases with glass covers grouped in such a way that a large and colourful insect, a butterfly or a beetle was placed in the centre and different species were arranged around it radially, symmetrically where possible.
When the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences was officially opened in 1832 Menetries was designated Curator of its entomological collections.
In 1855 he was elected Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, but at that time it provided no advantage in terms of material well-being, and he didn't even have an assistant at the museum.
He examined collections of A. Leman, a doctor and naturalist who was sent on a Russian political mission to Khiva and Bukhara (nearly unstudied at that time), and who died on the way back from Central Asia.
In order to cope with the huge amount of technical work and to have time for investigations Menetries sought the assistance of a small group of St. Petersburg amateurs in entomology (primarily butterfly and beetle collectors).
The circle of amateur entomologists around Menetries had played a positive role in the development of entomology in Russia.
The organizing meeting of the Russian Entomological Society took place on 25 February 1860 in the large official apartment of general K. Manderstern, Superintendent of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress.