Hercule Nicolet

Hercule Nicolet (born January 18, 1801 in La Ferrière BE , † September 16, 1872 in Versailles ) was a Swiss entomologist , illustrator and arachnologist .

Life

Lithograph of some spiders by Hercule Nicolet

He was the son of the lithographer Bénédict-Alphonse Nicolet (1743-1807), who had a lithograph workshop with Jean Coulin (Nicolet et Coulin). Hercule Nicolet also became a lithographer and went to Paris in 1835.

He married in 1837 and opened a lithography workshop in Neuchâtel. There he printed for the naturalist Louis Agassiz, among others . In 1843 he divorced and received custody of his two sons. He moved to Paris, got by with smaller jobs and became a conservator at the Institut national agronomique in Versailles until its dissolution in 1852. In the same year he married again and the marriage resulted in a son and a daughter. This was followed by another period of deprivation until he became a librarian at the Ecole vétérinaire de Maisons Alfort in 1861. Most recently, the Franco-Prussian War ended his employment as a librarian and increasing arthritis made it impossible for him to work as a lithographer. He is buried in the Saint-Maurice cemetery.

His specialty was shaggy tails and springtails , but he also published a work on the spiders of Chile in which he described 297 species, all but 4 of which are new and mostly still valid today. However, according to Cuevas, who researched his biography, he was never in Chile.

Memberships

In 1842 Nicolet was introduced by Félix Édouard Guérin-Méneville as member number 268 of the Société cuviérienne .

Fonts

• Recherches pour servir a l'histoire des Podurelles, Nouv. Mém. Soc. Helvet. Sci. Nat., 6, Neuchâtel, Imprimerie de Petipierre 1841, pp. 1-88
• Aracnidos, in: Claude Gay, Historia fisica y politica de Chile, Volume 3, Paris: Thunot 1849
• Histoire naturelle des Acariens qui se trouvent aux environs de Paris, Arch. Du Muséum., VII, 1855, pp. 385-482
• Essai sur une classification des insectes aptères, de l'ordre des Thysanoures, Annales de la Société Entomologique de France, 2e Série, Volume 5, 1847, pp. 335-395

literature

• Jean-Paul Schaer / BE: Hercule Nicolet. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Arturo Muñoz Cuevas: Hercule Nicolet, Boletin Sociedad Entomologica Aragonesa, No. 39, 2006, 455-458, pdf
• Pierre Bonnet: Bibliographica Araneorum, Volume 1, Toulouse 1945
• L. Favre: Hercule Nicolet. Lithographs. Musée neuchâtelois 1890, pp. 130–135.
• Société Cuvierienne: Nouveaux membres admis dans la Société curvienne . In: Revue Zoologique par La Société Cuvierienne . tape 5 , 1842, pp. 332 ( biodiversitylibrary.org ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Société cuviérienne, p. 332.