Background
Jacob Boll was born on May 29, 1828, in Bremgarten, Canton Aargau, Switzerland, the son of Henry and Magdalena (Peier) Boll.
Jacob Boll was born on May 29, 1828, in Bremgarten, Canton Aargau, Switzerland, the son of Henry and Magdalena (Peier) Boll.
Jacob Boll was educated as a pharmacist at the University of Jena, Germany, which he left without a degree.
After studying Boll returned to his native town and settled down to a long career as apothecary in his own pharmacy in Bremgarten. His interest in natural history had been awakened during his gymnasium days in Switzerland, and had been fostered at Jena. His persistent study of the natural history of his canton bore fruit in a number of now little-known papers, and in a thin book on the flora of Canton Aargau, published in 1869. In this year he visited Texas, and during 1870 collected so well in Texas for Louis Agassiz at Harvard that there are said to be Boll specimens in pretty nearly every department of the Harvard Museum. The winter of 1870 Boll spent with Agassiz at Harvard, returning to Switzerland in the spring. He remained in Switzerland until 1873.
Boll then decided to accept the repeated invitations of Agassiz to become a staff member of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, and came to America for the second time in January 1874. On reaching Cambridge, he first learned of the death of Agassiz on December 14, 1873. At once he returned to Texas, and during the years 1874-1880 he investigated the geology and natural history of that state. During the four seasons of 1877-1880 he collected fossils and reptiles, chiefly in northern and northwestern Texas for Edward D. Cope. He died in the field while collecting fossils in Wilbarger County.
Boll first intelligibly identified the Permian rocks of northwest Texas. He discovered many new species of fossil plants and animals which were described by Cope in a series of contributions on the Permian vertebrates of Texas (1878 - 1883). Many Boll specimens of recent Texas reptiles, batrachia, and fishes are referred to by Cope in his book entitled, On the Zoological Position of Texas (1880). Boll's large collection of microlepidoptera, embracing species from the entire world, passed at his death into the hands of B. Neumoegen and Dr. C. V. Riley, with whom he had worked on the United States Entomological Commission for the study of the Rocky Mountain locust (1877 - 1880).
Boll was an indefatigable collector in all groups of insects, and most of the European museums have specimens of his collecting. He was commissioned by European silk growers to investigate American species of silkworms, with an eye to the introduction into Europe of hardy species. His cantonal government commissioned him in 1874 to make extensive collections of the Colorado potato beetle, as well as to collect the seeds of woody plants, and the freshwater and marine mollusks of Texas. During the last two years of his life he printed in the American Naturalist two papers that "were only the introduction to what promised to be valuable original contributions to the geology of Texas. "
Boll was a member of the Boston Society of Natural History and the Academia Caesarea Leopoldino-Carolina Naturae Curiosorum.
In 1854 Boll married Henriette Humbel. She died in August 1873.
