William Frederick Purcell
William Frederick Purcell (born September 18, 1866 in London , † October 3, 1919 in Bergvliet , Cape Town ) was a South African arachnologist and zoologist. He is considered a pioneer of arachnology in South Africa.
Purcell was the son of an Irish farmer who emigrated to South Africa and lived in Cape Town from 1868, his mother Sophia was born a Duke. He grew up on his maternal uncle's farm in Bergvliet and studied from 1884 to 1887 at the University of Cape Town (Bachelor of Science in natural science, mathematics) and at several German universities and received his doctorate in Berlin in 1895 on spiders. In 1896 he became the first assistant at the South African Museum (after he had unsuccessfully applied as director to succeed Roland Trimen). He had previously donated his insect collection to the museum. He was responsible for terrestrial invertebrates (excluding insects) at the museum and stayed at the museum until 1905 when he resigned due to health problems. But he remained Honorary Keeper until 1908. Purcell moved to the family farm in Bergvliet (now a suburb of Cape Town) where his mother and sister lived, continued to study arachnology, but mainly devoted himself to botany and the management of the farm. He created a herbarium of wild plants on his farm and its surroundings (with 2500 leaves), which is now at the Compton Herbarium (National Institute of Botany, Cape Town).
Purcell first named numerous spiders and scorpions in South Africa, including the tarantula genus Harpactirella and the scorpion Parabuthus transvaalicus . He was particularly concerned with mygalomorphae .
As an arachnologist, he was a pioneer in South Africa, whose spider fauna had previously occasionally been processed by experts from the Natural History Museum in London based on specimens sent in ( Reginald Innes Pocock and his successor for spiders and myriapods Arthur Stanley Hirst and the clergyman and arachnologist Octavius Pickard- Cambridge (1828-1917)).
He worked with his wife, Anna Purcell, on research on spiders. His successor as arachnologist and assistant for terrestrial invertebrates at the South African Museum was Richard William Ethelbert Tucker .
Purcell was a member of the South African Philosophical Society, and when it became the Royal Society of South Africa in 1908, he was one of its first fellows . In 1917 he was on their council. From 1905 he was a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and from 1910 the South African Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also a corresponding member of the Zoological Society of London . 1900 to 1903 he was external examiner (examiner) for zoology at the University of Cape Town.
Purcell was interested in Cape Town's local history and was the driving force behind the South African Museum's acquisition of the Koopman-De Wet House in Cape Town in 1911 and its conversion into a local history museum.
Fonts
- Development and origin of the respiratory organs of Araneae, London, 1909
Web links
- Tarantupedia (English)
- Arachnologist Biographies (Spanish)
- Biography, Biographical Database of Southern African Science (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Purcell, On the Construction of the Phalangid Eyes. Magazine wiss. Zool., 58, 1894, pp. 1-53
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Purcell, William Frederick |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | South African arachnologist and zoologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 18, 1866 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 3, 1919 |
| Place of death | Bergvliet , Cape Town |