He took very high rank as an analytical chemist; was devoted, industrious, and able in the department assigned to him. He is spoken of in a published description of the Point Shirley works as of "great ability, and in his day having few equals and certainly no superior."[13] Unselfish and generous, he was a warm and steadfast friend. On any occasion for it his helpfulness was ungrudging and unstinted, regardless alike of cost or exertion. His early death prematurely closed a career which under circumstances wisely improved might have been an extremely brilliant one. Those who knew him most familiarly still remember his cheery, cordial greeting, and his hearty response to their sincere regard for him. The following obituary notice of him was written by Dr. Jackson.[14] "We have to record the death of one of our excellent practical chemists and metallurgists, Frederick W. Davis, of Boston, who died at his father's house, of typhoid fever, on the 12th of December last, at the age of thirty-one years. Mr. Davis received a good education at the school of Mr. Greene, of Jamaica Plains, in Roxbury, and was then placed under the scientific instruction of Dr. Charles T. Jackson, in whose laboratory he pursued his studies with great diligence and success, for three years. "In 1844 he accompanied Dr. Jackson in his early explorations of the copper regions of Lake Superior, and distinguished himself as an active and faithful explorer of the mineral district on Keweenaw Point. In 1847 he was appointed by the Revere Copper Company as Superintendent of their copper-smelting furnaces at Point Shirley, which he conducted with signal ability from that time until he was seized with the fever of which he died. While attending to the active and complicated business of the copper-works, making all the assays of ores, fluxes, furnace slags, and of the crude copper produced, he found time to make many interesting and important metallurgical researches, and many scientific observations and experiments on the formation of artificial minerals, both in the furnace and in the roasting heaps of copper ores. He produced a new mineral, composed of the sulphurets of zinc and copper, which was found in brilliant black crystals in the roasted ores. He pointed out several new forms of crystals in the slags from his blast furnaces, and he also beautifully illustrated the theory of the formation of native copper from the vaporized chloride of copper, while working the Atacamite of Peru. "The most important of his labors were of an eminently practical nature, such as discovering the best and most economical methods of mixing the various copper ores of commerce, so as to make one ore flux another, and thus to obtain the largest yield of metal at the least expense.