Nikolai Petrovich Vagner

Born 1829 at the Bogo-slovskii plant in what is now Karpinsk Sverdlovsk Oblast; died Mar. 22 (Apr. 4), 1907, in St. Petersburg. Russian zoologist and writer.

Vagner graduated from the University of Kazan and became a doctor of natural sciences (1854). He was a professor of zoology at the University of Kazan (from 1860), then at St. Petersburg University (from 1871). His basic works were on entomology. In 1862, Vagner discovered the phenomenon of paedogenesis, the so-called larval reproduction of certain invertebrates. In 1881 he was the initiator of the organization of the Solovki Biological Station, which was moved in 1899 to the Murmansk shore of Kol’skii Bay. (Since 1958 it has been called the Murmansk Marine Biology Institute of the Kol’skii branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.) Among Vagner’s literary works, the best known are The Tales of Kot-Murlyka (1872), which are moral and psychological in content and have gone through many editions.