Life
F. O. Pickard-Cambridge was born in Warmwell, Dorset, where his father was rector. He became a curate at St Cuthbert's church in Carlisle for a few years after having been educated at Sherborne School and Exeter College, Oxford. He left to become a professional biological illustrator, and in 1894–1895 spent several months in the Amazon as a naturalist on board the SS Faraday. He found much of interest on his voyage and began writing papers in 1896 to describe the spiders he discovered.
He had a promising career ahead of him, but this promise was not to be fulfilled. Bristowe, writing in the book British Spiders, 1951, said of this time in his life: "Whilst he was still in his 30s, however, a marked change came over him which led to misfortune". He gave up the priesthood because of his extreme religious views, and became estranged from friends and family on account of his strong political opinions. This unfortunate new tendency also spilled over into his natural history work, and he had fierce arguments with other scientists, such as Karsch, over questions of nomenclature.
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“No life if it is properly realized is without its cosmic importance.”
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“There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being, as if he had drunk some powerful drug. He had been feeling weak and done before. Now the life came back into him, he felt delivered from his own fretted, daily self.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)