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Frank Gouldsmith Speck, an anthropologist and ethnographer at the University of Pennsylvania, specialized in the study of Algonquian and Iroquois peoples in both the Eastern woodlands of the U.S. and the boreal areas of Eastern Canada. His interest in these peoples had been sparked on a camping trip around 1900 when he became friends with young members of the Mohegan tribe in Connecticut. A graduate of Columbia University, having earned a BA and MA by 1905, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Yuchi people of Oklahoma among whom he had worked in 1904, 1905 and 1908, under noted anthropologist Franz Boas for a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1908. The University then hired him in a dual capacity as an assistant in ethnology at the university’s museum and instructor in anthropology. In 1912 he was appointed a full-time faculty member in the newly created Department of Anthropology; in 1913 he became chairman of the department, a role he filled until 1949.

Dr. Frank (Franz) Spaeth was born on October 4, 1863, in Vienna, Austria.

He was an Austrian entomologist and author. For nearly half a century, he specialized almost exclusively on the cassids, building up his fine private collection by purchasing material from other collections/collectors and maintaining voucher specimens which he kept after identifying them for other museums and institutions. The collection was housed in Spaeth’s apartment in Vienna, Austria, in 80 large cabinet drawers. During World War II, it was condensed into 40 drawers and was kept safe in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Spaeth’s collection survived the war, but the first copy of a new manuscript on the Cassidinae beetles was destroyed by bombing in Vienna. In 1898, Dr. Spaeth published the first of his many papers dealing with cassidine taxonomy. By 1943, the date of his last publication, one hundred and twenty papers, many large and consisting of several parts, had appeared. In 1950, Dr. Spaeth’s Cassidinae Collection (23,094 specimens of 2,211 species), manuscripts, cassid literature, card-index, notes, and unfinished works was acquired and moved to the Manchester Museum, England. His Chrysomedinae-Cassidinae collection is among the finest collections of tortoise-beetles. The new genus Spaethaspis was named in honour of Dr. Spaeth.

He died on July 29, 1946, in Vienna, Austria.