Dame Miriam Rothschild, 96
Scion of the famous British banking family, Dame Miriam Rothschild in no way fit the stereotype of the spoiled heiress. Call her the Peggy Guggenheim of the natural world and you wouldn't be far off. Popularly known as "Queen of the Fleas," Rothschild-without a formal scientific, or even college, education-rose beyond academia to become one of the world's foremost experts on parasites, insects and butterfly and bird behavior. She died of natural causes on January 20 at her home, Ashton Wold, in central England.
Born in 1908, Rothschild's birthright was a world of rarified luxury, intellectual refinement and a firm commitment to conservation. Her father, Charles Rothschild, a senior partner in the family bank, NM Rothschild & Sons, was the youngest son of the first Lord Rothschild, the first observant Jew ever to be granted a peerage. It was he who first campaigned in the UK for a network of nature reserves, nominating 280 potential sites throughout the Kingdom. The elder Rothschild was Charles' eccentric brother Walter, a man who kept a stable of emus, kangaroos and zebras just because he could, a man who also amassed a vast private collection of stuffed animals, birds, insects and reptiles that is now a large part of the British Natural History Museum.
After Charles died when Miriam was 15, she became close to Walter, the second Lord Rothschild, and passed hours studying his collection, educating herself on all matters natural. In the 30s, she began work at the Marine Biological Station in Plymouth, researching the mollusk Nucula and its parasites. This work was to decide the rest of her life. A curious, very old-world mix of esthete and scientist, artist and observer, Rothschild went on to publish more than 300 papers on everything from the chemical group pyrazines to rabbit hormones.
Her best-known work is the enormous Catalogue of the Rothschild Collection of Fleas-a six-volume colossus of scholarship that took over 30 years to compile. It's an exhaustive reference manual on fleas and flea behavior that introduced one of the world's most neglected species to a scientific community that had seemingly-with the technological advances of WWII-moved far beyond the natural world. An oft-quoted finding of Rothschild's is that the average flea develops an acceleration of 149g when taking off, a number 20 times more than the power summoned by a rocket reentering Earth's atmosphere.
Rothschild was also a noted gardener in the old British tradition. Disavowing her earlier love for orchids and roses, Rothschild created gardens of wildflowers-primroses, ladies' smocks and buttercups-allowing them their own space and sprawl in contrast to the then-prevalent style of ordered, staid Edwardian garden planning. In her life as in her science, every interest was organic, and every method had its poetry.