Background
Bollman was born in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, December 24, 1868.
Bollman was born in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, December 24, 1868.
He attended Indiana University Bloomington where he studied under John Casper Branner and David Starr Jordan.
He graduated in June of 1889 and was appointed immediately after as an assistant in the United States Fish Commission, and died of dysentery contracted while collecting fish in the swamps of Waycross, Georgia on July 13. He published thirteen papers between the years of 1887 and 1889, including papers co-authored with Jordan. Of myriapods, he described 65 new species in North America.
J. South. Kingsley considered him "one of our best students of the Myriapoda", and he was considered by biologist Ralph Crabill "the most brilliant chilopod systematist of this country in the 19th century".
He was posthumously commemorated by Jordan in the name of the goby genus Bollmannia and by Filippo Silvestri, who named the millipede genus Bollmania.