George Campbell Eickwort (1949–1994)

The Department of Entomology at Cornell University saw a time of great research and teaching in insect morphology at the end of the Twentieth Century, most of which came from the efforts by two extraordinary systematists: William L. Brown Jr. and George Campbell Eickwort.

Brown was the premier ant systematist of his time. His publications on ant taxonomy exude his masterly grasp on morphology, and he supervised a multitude of students doing dissertations on basic comparative anatomy for the group. Two excellent examples are Thomas Eisner’s 1957 work on the proventriculus¹ and Gotwald’s 1967 detailed work on mouthparts². Eickwort main research focused on sweat bees, but as a teacher he was responsible for the course on insect morphology that covered all insects groups plus relevant outgroups. Sadly, by the end of the 1990′s both men had died.

Eickwort course was legendary. I know of students pursuing PhDs on other prominent universities, like Harvard, that spend one semester at Cornell just to take this course. The main part of it consisted on laboratory practices that gave students direct experience with morphology while at the same time it introduced basic techniques on dissection, microscopy and drawing. The last of these is essential for understanding morphology: drawing forces you to truly look at the details of the structure under analysis.

Eickwort’s laboratory manual was compiled and it is available on the web as a series on pdf’s. This is the version of the course I took during my graduate student years at Cornell. It is a great teaching resource. Oh, and the drawing in the cover is by yours truly.

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