Vigelius, Carl Ludwig Christian

Lawyer, entomologist

Born: 15.02.1797 in Kirberg

died: 15.04.1857 in Wiesbaden

After studying law in Göttingen (1816-19), Vigelius became a member of the General Domain Directorate in Wiesbaden in 1820 and a tax councillor in 1834. From 1839 until his retirement in 1847, he was a member of the General Tax Directorate. Vigelius was one of the first men to join the Nassau Association for Natural History and soon took over the association's accounting and treasury as successor to Court Councillor Dr. Wilhelm Fritze. As a boy, he had been inspired to collect butterflies by Christian Schlichter, a distant relative, who was the Wiesbaden bathhouse keeper and postman at the "Zum Adler" bathhouse.

Together with the private owner Joseph Becker and the mill owner Wilhelm Blum, Vigelius formed a working group which, in addition to collecting and breeding butterflies, was responsible for sifting through and organizing the butterfly collections brought into the museum. Vigelius published a list of the butterflies he had collected in around 30 years, mostly in the Wiesbaden area, in volume 6 of the association's yearbooks in 1850.

He was in contact with other entomologists such as Carl Heinrich Georg von Heyden from Frankfurt, who made a name for himself with important articles on beetles in Nassau in the yearbooks of the Nassauischer Verein für Naturkunde.

Vigelius' collection of native and exotic butterflies, which was presented to the association as a gift in 1869, contains 731 species of large butterflies in 2,558 specimens and 584 species of small butterflies in 1,231 specimens after revision by Dr. Rössler. Today it is part of the natural history collections of the Museum Wiesbaden.