Work
F. O. Pickard-Cambridge's papers were published between 1889 and 1905, some posthumously. He worked on spiders from across the world, not just British ones, and as opposed to being a collector was more concerned with the study of specimens in reference collections and papers – work which was often passed over in previous decades when many new discoveries were being made by explorers and collectors. His work was largely taxonomic, consisting of a re-examination of the relationships between various species, including many described by his celebrated uncle. For example, he discovered several species which had been described more than once and so had more than one name, or, by contrast, more than one species which had only one name. He created several new genera and added sixteen species of spider to the British list.
His cousin Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, said of him in 1918
was a born naturalist and a very clever and artistic draughtsman, and was capable of very rapid and effective work, sometimes, indeed, too rapid, and marred by hasty conclusions and a tendency to treat the latest idea as if it were a new gospel, but almost always useful and suggestive; moreover, as a companion he was full of fun and resource. The extreme political and moral ideas which he felt it his duty to preach somewhat indiscriminately in the later years of his life ultimately brought about a partial severance between him and my father, but his early death was undoubtedly a loss to science as well as to those who had delighted in his companionship. His papers, chiefly on foreign Arachnida, showed great ability, and it was he who undertook so much of the treatment of the Araneidea for the Biologia Centrali-Americana as my father could not complete by himself.
Later in his career he used his considerable skill as an illustrator to illustrate many books and papers on natural history and other subjects.
Read more about this topic: Frederick Octavius Pickard-Cambridge
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