Friedrich Hermann Loew (July 19, 1807 - April 21, 1879) was a German entomologist who specialised in the study of Diptera, an order of insects including flies, mosquitoes, gnats and midges. He described many world species and was the first specialist to work on the Diptera of the United States.
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Hermann Loew was born in Weissenfels, Saxony a short distance south of Halle (Germany). The Loew family, though not wealthy, was well-placed. Loew's father was a functionary for the Department of Justice of the Duchy of Saxony who later became a Geheimer Regierungsrath of Prussia. Between 1817 and 1829 Loew attended first the Convent school of Rossleben, then the University of Halle-Wittenberg, graduating in mathematics, philology and natural history.
Recognizing his abilities as a mathematician, the university, on his graduation, appointed him as a lecturer in the same subjects. In 1830 he went to Berlin and gave lessons in different higher grade schools including the Kadetten-Schule military school . Here he was private tutor to Prince Biron heir to the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia and the young Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Albrecht von Graefe (1828–1870) later one of the most famous oculists of all times. In 1834 Loew was appointed superior teacher (Oberlehrer) at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Posen, known today as St. John Cantius High School in Poznań, Poland where he taught mathematics and natural history. In the same year he married the daughter of senior preacher Ehricht, a favourite sermoniser. Several of Loew's pupils at Posen became scientific celebrities, the most notable being the philosopher Kuno Fischer (1824–1907) and the mathematicians Leo Konigsberge (1837–1921) and Lazarus Immanuel Fuchs (1835–1902). That they became such, gifted though they were, must have been due to Loew's extraordinary abilities and his popularity with students.
In 1841-2 Loew accompanied Heinrich Kiepert (1818–1899), a celebrated geographer, and August Schoenborn to the Near East. The results of this trip were later partly communicated to Hermann Carl Conrad Burmeister (1807–1892), and to Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), but the remainder (the greatest part), were used in Loew's own later publications. August Schoenborn, philologist and geographer, was also a professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Posen, and author of Latin school books. He eventually became Loew's brother-in-law. Humboldt was of course the author of the chattily readable "Kosmos", an account of the visible universe, and the most celebrated German naturalist explorer of his day. Many other countries were visited en route including Turkey and Asia Minor.
In 1848 Loew was elected to the German Parliament in Frankfurt am Main. Elected to the first German Parliament when 40 years old, Loew resisted the separatist longings of the Poles from his outpost (Posen) near the frontier of Poland. He belonged to Heinrich von Gagern's Imperial Party, a grouping which fostered Liberalism in Germany and pursued a policy of fusion for the German states.
Disillusioned by failure to realise German unity and distressed by the death of his 21 year-old daughter from the plague, in 1850, Loew left politics. In 1850 he was appointed director of the royal Realschule Mesritz (a Realschule is a school emphasizing technical and scientific studies). Due to the efforts of Loew, the Mesritz Realschule was later to became a gymnasium (a more classical sort of school, though still scientific). While at Mesritz Loew gave up politics so as not to be in conflict with the educational department, and resisted offers of a seat in the Prussian Landtag (Federal state parliament) for the district of Mesritz-Bomst.
Severe health problems between 1851 and 1854 forced retirement. In 1868 he received a pension and took up the study of Diptera full-time after moving to Guben, Prussia. Here he worked incessantly on Diptera.
In 1870 he was elected city-counsellor and vice-president of the city council in Guben and held a seat in the legislature in Berlin for the Sorau-Guben district between 1873 and 1876.
The imminent end of Loew was signalled on a summer holiday in Blankenburg in Thuringia when he had a paralytic stroke after which he sought treatment in the Diaconissen-Haus in Halle, Saxony, and died, on April 21, 1879. Only three of his seven children survived him. His obituary in the Vassisches Zeitung described him as a "distinguished pedagogue, naturalist pioneer of German Unity".
A Lutheran protestant, Loew's motto was "Gott Helfe"- God helps or God may help. Loew was an obsessive worker. Something of his nature can be judged from his refusing to eat warm food to pay off the loans incurred during his education, and from his extraordinary calligraphy, with its machine-like precision. There is never any difficulty with reading a Loew label, characteristically justified to the side margins. Loew shared such personality traits with the neurotically-obsessive fellow entomologist Alexander Henry Haliday.
Hermann Loew was undoubtedly the dominant dipterist from the 1840s and the following three decades. Although predominantly a describer- delineating the taxonomically useful characters of more than 4,000 species mainly from the Palaearctic and North America, but also from the Afrotropics and the Far East- Loew made important contributions to higher taxonomy.
Hermann Loew is best known with regard to Diptera paleontology for his work with Baltic amber inclusions. He was the first investigator to seriously interest himself in the Diptera of amber and his 1850 work on the amber Diptera from the Baltic region was the major foundation for all future study on amber Diptera.
Loew's personal Baltic amber collection is in the Natural History Museum, London. Types of fossil species based on material in the Klebs Collection are now in Göttingen. Fossil types based on specimens from the Berendt collection are in the Paläontologisches Museum, (Humboldt-Universitat), Berlin. Types of recent Diptera are in the Museum für Naturkunde, (Humboldt-Universitat), Berlin, except for the North American species, which are in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the South African material, which is in the University of Halle, Zoological Museum, and the Alaskan species, which are in the Zoological Museum in Helsingfors. Other Loew specimens, including types, are in the Natural History Museum in Stockholm and in the Natural History Museum, London (Lepidoptera from Turkey). Small numbers of specimens are in the Natural History Museum in Dublin, Ireland and in the Hope Department of Entomology, University of Oxford.
These papers and monographs from 1861-1865 give some indication of Loew's scope
Longer list of works see the references in Sabrosky's Family Group Names in Diptera and also the German version of this page.