Miriam Rothschild

Dame Miriam Rothschild, a scientist of the old style, died on January 20th 2005, aged 96

IN A typically generous moment, Miriam Rothschild once named a flea after a writer on The Economist. He had fortuitously helped to discover a new one on a zoological expedition in Africa. The gesture was probably the highest honour she could bestow on anyone.

She thought fleas beautiful. Gazing at their stained sections through the microscope, she once said, gave her a feeling as ecstatic as smoking cannabis. In her bedroom she kept them in cellophane bags, in order not to miss a thing that they were doing. She had discovered, by watching thousands of them jump, that they were actually adapted for flight, and that the jumping flea developed an acceleration on take-off 20 times that of a moon rocket re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. A lifelong atheist, she admitted that she had been tempted to believe in a creator when she discovered that the flea had a penis.

Her fascination had begun young, on holiday in Transylvania, when her father had allowed her to help him catch fleas from a mouse. Already, in the sprawling Rothschild family seat where she was brought up and informally schooled, Miriam had a collection of ladybirds and butterflies, the butterflies pinned on card by herself. But her father was a flea man. He and her uncle Walter had already established, at Tring in Hertfordshire, the largest private natural history collection in Britain: 200,000 birds’ eggs, 300,000 bird skins, 144 giant tortoises that wandered in the grounds, more than 2m butterflies, and plenty of fleas. These included 12 dressed fleas from Mexico, with a couple garbed like a bride and groom.

Her father’s obsession with fleas, however, was not a dilettante enthusiasm, but a serious scientific interest. He had identified the flea that carries plague, Xenopsylla cheopis Rothschild, and had written more than 150 papers on the creatures. His daughter followed him into the depths of parasitology. It was not a glamorous field. As she noted ruefully in her book “Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos”, a popular study of parasitism, “Birds’ fleas and feather lice do not sing. Nor do they fly about flashing brilliantly coloured wings in the sunshine ... The collectors of fleas and lice can be counted on the fingers of one hand!” Yet she loved them. Her life’s work, which took 30 years and filled six volumes, was to catalogue her father’s collection.

Nor did she stop there. As a passionate enthusiast for all living creatures (except some irritating humans), she produced more than 300 scientific papers over the years. She did special research into a parasite that lived only in the eyelashes of hippopotami. She studied the behaviour of black-headed gulls, buying gull-eggs in Leadenhall market in order to incubate them herself and put them in her aviary. During the second world war she tracked the role of wood pigeons in transmitting TB to cattle and, as she lurked in the fields with her crate of birds, was once taken for a German spy. She discovered that monarch butterflies absorbed toxins from milkweed in order to use them, as the plant did, for defence. She was most fascinated by the role of pyrazines, or aromas, in the lives of insects, pointing out that each species of butterflies and moths had its own distinctive scent. The smell of a very gently squeezed ladybird, she once said, “will stay

on your hands for days”.

As the years passed, this passionate scientist, who had never taken a degree and lived most of the time on the farm where she had been born, accumulated eight honorary doctorates. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society and of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. These honours were not always given without grumbles from the men in the labs. In an age of intense specialisation and professionalism in science, she appeared as a happy amateur and generalist. She was, in fact, a throwback to a different age, when gentlemen of means (and the Rothschilds had plenty of those) set up their own home laboratories and cabinets of curiosities, and pursued science for the sheer joy of it.

She also had a view of science that was unashamedly broad, taking in arts, literature and natural philosophy – much in the mould of Erasmus Darwin at the end of the 18th century, whose tomes on botany and zoology were written in enthusiastic verse. Very early, she was a part of the environmental movement and an exponent of the “web of life” theory, in which all species in an area dependon each other and on the preservation of habitat. Visitors to her farm in Northamptonshire found it a riot of weeds and wild flowers, a style she impressed on the Prince of Wales at Highgrove. She herself moved through the gardens like a ship in full sail, dressed in her favourite purple or sea-green gowns. Since she had eschewed leather on principle (together with meat and alcohol), she would sometimes wear white wellingtons for evening.

Perhaps the most pleasing image of her, though, was the one that appeared in the Latin citation for her honorary degree from Oxford in 1968. “She has come to this our Capitol”, it read, “not by degrees, but by one leap as of her fleas, in a triumphal chariot ... drawn not by Venus’s doves, Juno’s peacocks, Alexander’s gryphons or Pompey’s elephants, but by her sixty-odd species of avian parasites.”