Adalbert Seitz

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

He was a director of the Frankfurt zoo from 1893 to 1908 and is best known for editing the multivolume reference on the butterflies and larger moths of the world Die Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde which continued after his death.

Seitz moved to Darmstadt and invested much of his pension to aid zoo staff and then supported himself as the curator of the Senckenberg Museum, to which he donated his own butterfly collections.

Die Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde (The Macrolepidoptera of the World) consisted of sixteen volumes with four supplements published in German, French, and English.

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 about 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.

Authors contributing to The Macrolepidoptera of the World include Adalbert Seitz himself, Karl Jordan, Julius Röber, William Warren, Per Olof Christopher Aurivillius, Louis Beethoven Prout, Hans Fruhstorfer, Max Gaede, Thomas Lehmann, Richard Haensch, Gustav Weymer, Max Wilhelm Karl Draudt, Hans Stichel, Jules Paul Mabille, Max Bartel, Erich Martin Hering, Embrik Strand, Karl Grünberg, William Schaus, Walter Rothschild, Georg Eiffinger.