George and Elizabeth Peckham

George Williams Peckham (March 23, 1845 – January 10, 1914) and Elizabeth Maria Gifford Peckham (December 19, 1854 – February 11, 1940) were a married couple who were early American teachers, taxonomists, ethologists, arachnologists, and entomologists, specializing in animal behavior and in the study of jumping spiders (family Salticidae) and wasps.

At age 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in the American Civil War, reaching the rank of first lieutenant.

[1] Rather than practice medicine, however, he chose to teach biology at East Division High School of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In 1880, he organized the first American biological laboratory program in any high school, and in same year he married his colleague, Elizabeth Maria Gifford, one of the first science graduates from Vassar.

[3][4] Elizabeth Maria Gifford (later Peckham) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1854, later using the abbreviated forename 'Bessie' amongst friends as attested to by her classmate Sara Fleming Sharpe.

In later years, Elizabeth M. Gifford-Peckham is recorded as living with her daughter Mary Peckham Gross, whose children were "a comfort and joy to her".

In 1898, they produced On the Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps, a work considered a scientific classic for its style, as well as its scholarship.

In November 1912, the Alumnae Bulletin of Vassar reports that "Elizabeth Gifford Peckham and her husband spent last winter in Mexico".