Book Review: An adventurous life of Victor Ivanovich Motschulsky, described by himself

It is difficult to review the book one is editing.One sees the flaws, having already received comments from colleagues, zoologists and historians of science.But V.I.Motschulsky is such a compelling yet little-known personality that we find it our duty to review the book even though one of us is its editor.Among entomologists, rumors abound that Motschulsky, an outstanding specialist in insect systematics as well as an avid collector, stole beetle specimens from famous collections and argued with his European colleagues.He had a difficult personality.It is no accident that Walter Horn called him "the infernal entomologist."History and natural history are intertwined in the book, which consists in large part of memoirs recorded in Russian and German, and in part of reverse translations of Motschulsky's articles published in the 1850s-60s mostly in French.The first part is, first and foremost, a history, while the second is largely natural history.(Let us not forget that "biology", while coined as a term, was not widely used until the late 19 th century).The translation from German of the biographical and highly biased essay by W. Horn, which was written in the 1920s, is placed in the end of the book.V.I.Motschulsky was born in 1810.A military man, he participated in the suppression of the Polish uprising, where he was wounded and lost hearing in the left ear.Later, he served in the Caucasus, the so-called Kyrgyz steppe, East Siberia, and

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