Austrian-Italian physician, chemist and botanist. Giovanni (also known as Joannes Antonius) Scopoli was born in Cavalese (Tyrol) and he studied there as well as at Innsbruck where he graduated as a medic in 1743. There was no professor of natural history at Innsbruck at that time and so his knowledge in this field was largely self-taught. As a practising physician Scopoli worked in Cavalese, Trento and Venice, and it was at this time he developed an interest in botany.
After brief employment as a secretary to the Prince Bishop Leopold Firman he undertook two further years of study in Graz and Seckau (Styria). In 1753 he went to Venice for his state physician's examination and defended a dissertation in which he created a diagnostic key to genera, classified according to the Tournefortian system. The following year Scopoli was named physician to the mercury miners in the community of Idria (Carniola) which was in the Habsburg Empire and is now part of Slovenia. The region was poorly developed and Scopoli lived for well over ten years in terrible conditions, losing his wife and two sons at this time. This position did, however, afford him great opportunities to pursue his interest in natural history and he explored the region's plants, animals and minerals. In 1760 he published his Flora carniolica which contained the description of over 1,000 plants (about a quarter of which are cryptogamic), using Linnaean nomenclature but classified according to his own natural system.
Moving to present day Czechoslovakia, he took over from Nicolaas Jacquin as professor of mineralogy and metallurgy at the mining academy in Schemnitz. After fulfilling this role for nine years (1767-1776) Scopoli was named professor of chemistry and botany at Pavia and it is here that he produced his most important botanical works, the Introductio ad historiam naturalem (1777) and an impressive three-volume folio work Deliciae florae et faunae insubricae (1786-1788). The former is interesting because it lists all known genera at the time in the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms, arranged in accordance with his own, quite accurate, natural system.
Heavily influenced by Michel Adanson for the plant section, his system had no followers and faded into obscurity. In the latter he describes plants, animals and minerals from northern Italy and it contains an impressive set of illustrations. One of them depicted a worm which Scopoli had named and dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks in what has become known as the 'worm hoax'. The specimen Scopoli received was said to have been regurgitated by a woman in Piedmont, but it transpired that the 'new species' was actually a piece of chicken gizzard. It is likely that a prank was played on him by a long-standing enemy, L. Spallanziz, with whom he had argued over missing specimens to the point where an inquiry was launched by the Imperial Royal Government. The Deliciae was cut short by his death, but a further 98 paintings of plants, insects and molluscs were discovered, helping to piece together what the remaining volumes would have been like. Most of Scopoli's specimens were lost, but a set of his herbarium was received by Linnaeus and is therefore housed in London at the Linnean Society. His plant specimens at Berlin were largely destroyed and those at PAV (the University of Pavia) have not been retrieved. They may have been lost during World War One.
Sources:
A. Newton, 1882, Scopoli's Ornithological papers from his Deliciae florae et faunae insubricae (Ticini: 1786-1788)
M. Siviero and C. Violani, 2006, "Drawings for an exacting author: illustrations from Giovanni Antonio Scopoli's "Deliciae florae et faunae insubricae"", Archives of Natural History, 33(2): 214-231
F.A. Stafleu, 1971, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans
F.A. Stafleu and R.S. Cowan, 1976-1998, Taxonomic Literature, 2nd edition (TL-2).
