Dear Lord Rothschild; Birds, Butterflies and History

Philadelphia: Balaban, 1983. Presumed U.S. First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. XX, [4], 398, [2] pages. Illustrated (genealogy) endpapers. 12 color plates 147 black and white photographs. Family Trees (fold-out), Maps. Notes. Bibliography Name in ink on fep. DJ has wear, front corner tear, and some soiling. Dame Miriam Louisa Rothschild DBE FRS (5 August 1908 - 20 January 2005) was a British natural scientist and author with contributions to zoology, entomology, and botany. During the 1930s she made a name for herself at the Marine Biological Station in Plymouth, studying the mollusc Nucula and its trematode parasites (Rothschild 1936, 1938a, 1938b). Because of her inherited wealth, she never had to apply for any grants or funding. As a result of this and her lack of formal education—all her doctorates were honorary—she would always be an "amateur". Prior to World War II, she pressed the UK Government to admit more German Jews as refugees from Nazi Germany. During the war, she worked at Bletchley Park on codebreaking. Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Baron de Rothschild, FRS (1868 - 1937), was a British banker, politician, zoologist and scion of the Rothschild family. He was presented with the famous Balfour Declaration which pledged to a Jewish national home in Palestine. Rothschild was the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1925 to 1926. While Rothschild himself traveled and collected in Europe and North Africa for many years, his work and health concerns limited his range and he employed others to collect for him in remote and little-known parts of the world. He also hired taxidermists, a librarian, and, most importantly, professional scientists to work with him to curate and write up the resulting collections. At its largest, Rothschild's collection included 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 birds' eggs, 2,250,000 butterflies and 30,000 beetles, as well as thousands of specimens of mammals, reptiles and fishes. They formed the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a private individual.