Dear Lord Rothschild: Birds, Butterflies And History

Glenside, PA: Balaban Publishers. Hardcover. 1983. 1st Edition. 8vo 398pp . Very Good in Good+ DJ. B&W and Color Photographs. DJ is stretched and has light edgewear . Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Baron de Rothschild (1868-1937), was a British banker, politician, zoologist and a scion of the Rothschild family. Rothschild studied zoology at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Meeting Albert Günther sparked his interest in the taxonomy of birds and butterflies. Although Rothschild himself travelled and collected in Europe and North Africa for many years, his work and health concerns limited his range, and beginning while at Cambridge he employed others - explorers, professional collectors, and residents - 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: Ernst Hartert, for birds, from 1892until his retirement at the age of 70 in 1930; and Karl Jordan for entomology, from 1893 until Rothschild's death in 1937. 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 .