Otto Kleinschmidt

He began a popular science series called the new Brehm library writing a volume on the hummingbirds and editing a few others until his death.

In 1927 he became director of the church research centre in Lutherstadt Wittenberg where he worked on a unification of religion and natural science.

He made a collecting trip to Herzegovina and Bosnia in 1893 and wrote a study on the variation of Garrulus glandarius.

At the same time he produced a monograph series titled Berajah:Zoographia infinita in which he wrote about his own ideas.

His position was that similar "forms" (species) found in geographically distant regions could be accounted for by "formation rings" – with a fixed set of characters.

[4][5] Kleinschmidt's book The Formenkreis Theory and the Progress of the Organic World was translated in 1930 by Francis Charles Robert Jourdain.

[6][7][8] Bernhard Rensch developed some aspects of the Formenkreis theory using the term "racial circles" but he was critical of Kleinschmidt's anti-evolutionist stance.

Historians of science Georgy S. Levit, Kay Meister and Uwe Hoßfeld have noted that: Kleinschmidt’s creationistic concept led him not only to the rejection of the Darwinian theory of descent, but also to the negation of the post-Mendelian genetics.

[2] Professor of biology Eugene Potapov argues that despite Kleinschmidt's writings being obscure and rarely cited today, he nevertheless "outlined the modern genetic approach to the understanding of the systematics of large falcons.

"[10] Kleinschmidt worked on a book on songbirds (1921) after being encouraged Otto Schmeil (1860-1943), the author of several popular German textbooks.