The New International Encyclopædia/Swammerdam, Jan

SWAMMERDAM, swäm'mẽr-däm, Jan (1637-80). A Dutch naturalist, born in Amsterdam. He studied medicine at Leyden, but devoted most of his life to the study of insects and other animals. He was a skilled dissector of small animals, and was the father of the scientific study of the morphology and metamorphosis of insects. He first made a natural classification of insects by distingiiishing between those which have a complete metamorphosis and those which have not. He wrote: De Respiratione usuque Pulmonum (1667); Allgemeene verhandeling van bloedeloose diertjes (1669); Biblia Naturæ, sive Historia Insectorum in Certas Classes Redacta (ed. Boerhaave, 1737-38).