author
Felix Antonio de Brito Capello
1828–1879
A nineteenth-century Portuguese naturalist, he wrote with the close attention of a field scientist and helped expand knowledge of marine life and spiders in Portugal. His work is especially tied to the early study of fish and other species described from Portuguese waters.
1 Audiobook
Descripção de algumas especies novas ou pouco conhecidas de crustaceos e arachnidios de Portugal e possessões portuguezas do ultramar
by Felix Antonio de Brito Capello
About the author
Born in Peniche on March 8, 1828, and deceased in Lisbon on April 16, 1879, Félix António de Brito Capelo was a Portuguese biologist and oceanographer. Sources describing his life consistently credit him as a pioneer in Portuguese ichthyology and arachnology, noting his role in scientific expeditions and in describing species that were new to science.
His surviving bibliography points to a writer deeply engaged with zoological description. Records from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Project Gutenberg list works on Portuguese fishes and on crustaceans, showing that his published writing grew directly out of observation, classification, and collaboration with other naturalists.
For listeners coming to him through older scientific literature, he is best understood as an author from a period when natural history and exploration were closely linked. Even when the prose is technical, his books preserve a vivid sense of discovery and of the effort to document the living world carefully and systematically.