clozaril
11-03-2009, 12:03 PM
the rothschild flea collection :eek:
a bizarre obsessional is this a result of inter-breeding ?
miriam rothschild, a parasite lover
http://www.rothschildfostertrust.com/images/dynamic/16.jpg
Rothschild was the world's expert on fleas. She loved them, lived for them - a passion acquired from her father, Charles Rothschild, a banker who collected and discovered some 30,000 species of flea in his lifetime, including the chief carrier of bubonic plague. The Rothschild fleas (some million-plus specimens, now housed in the British Natural History Museum) represent more than 90 percent of all known fleas.
But a collection means nothing if nobody studies and interprets it. The daughter spent more than 30 years painstakingly examining the fleas under magnification, eventually producing a multivolume illustrated catalog of the collection, a sort of Who's Who for flea-ologists.
She herself also eagerly collected fleas: bartered for them in New Guinea, smuggled them out of Australia on flea-ridden mice. She peered at them through a microscope she'd set up in the bedroom of her baronial estate in Northamptonshire; she kept them in plastic bags so that her children - two adopted, four from her 14-year marriage to an English-Hungarian spy - wouldn't disturb them. If we were fleas, our hips would contain a rubber-like fluid enabling us to leap a height equivalent to the Empire State Building - a fact Rothschild discovered by photographing fleas at high speeds, then dissecting their motion moment by moment.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9F0DE0DE1738F933A25757C0A962948260
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/magazine/25roth.html
Miriam Rothschild - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
a bizarre obsessional is this a result of inter-breeding ?
miriam rothschild, a parasite lover
http://www.rothschildfostertrust.com/images/dynamic/16.jpg
Rothschild was the world's expert on fleas. She loved them, lived for them - a passion acquired from her father, Charles Rothschild, a banker who collected and discovered some 30,000 species of flea in his lifetime, including the chief carrier of bubonic plague. The Rothschild fleas (some million-plus specimens, now housed in the British Natural History Museum) represent more than 90 percent of all known fleas.
But a collection means nothing if nobody studies and interprets it. The daughter spent more than 30 years painstakingly examining the fleas under magnification, eventually producing a multivolume illustrated catalog of the collection, a sort of Who's Who for flea-ologists.
She herself also eagerly collected fleas: bartered for them in New Guinea, smuggled them out of Australia on flea-ridden mice. She peered at them through a microscope she'd set up in the bedroom of her baronial estate in Northamptonshire; she kept them in plastic bags so that her children - two adopted, four from her 14-year marriage to an English-Hungarian spy - wouldn't disturb them. If we were fleas, our hips would contain a rubber-like fluid enabling us to leap a height equivalent to the Empire State Building - a fact Rothschild discovered by photographing fleas at high speeds, then dissecting their motion moment by moment.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9F0DE0DE1738F933A25757C0A962948260
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/magazine/25roth.html
Miriam Rothschild - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia