Jacob Theodor Klein

Jacob Theodor Klein, who lived from 1685 to 1759 and was nicknamed Plinius Gedanensium, was a German jurist, historian, botanist, zoologist, mathematician and diplomat in the service of the King of Poland, Augustus II the Strong. Born into a family of lawyers in Königsberg, he studied law there while attending lectures on natural history, travelled through England, the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic between 1706 and 1712, and from 1713 served the city of Danzig as secretary. He set up a botanical garden there in 1718 and a collection of live animals and natural history specimens known as the Museum Kleinianum. He began publishing in 1722 and devised a system of classifying animals by the number, shape and position of the limbs, which put him at odds with Linnaeus; his work on sea urchins was the most prominent source on them at the time, and his essay Tentamen Herpetologiae of 1755 contained the first mention of the term herpetology. He was elected to several scientific societies, including the Royal Society in London, and in 1742 was a founding member of the Natural History Society of Danzig.