Albertus Seba

Albertus Seba (1665 to 1736) was a Dutch pharmacist, zoologist and collector who built one of the largest cabinets of curiosities in the Netherlands of his time. Born in Etzel near Friedeburg, he moved to Amsterdam as an apprentice and around 1700 opened a pharmacy near the harbour. He asked sailors and ship surgeons to bring him exotic plants and animal products for preparing drugs, and began to collect snakes, birds, insects, shells and lizards at home. From 1711 he supplied medicines to the Russian court, and in early 1716 Peter the Great bought his complete first collection, on the recommendation of the tsar's head physician Robert Erskine. Seba then built a second, larger collection. Through him the anatomist Frederik Ruysch also sold his collection to the tsar, and the two together so enlarged the imperial cabinet that they led to the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the new Kunstkammer building, opened in 1728 as the first Russian public museum. He described his collections in a lavishly illustrated four volume Thesaurus, and his early work on taxonomy influenced Linnaeus. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in October 1728.