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Margarita Dawson Stelfox ARCScI (1886 – 1971) was an Irish botanist, specialising in Mycetozoa.

Life

Margarita Dawson Stelfox was born Margarita Dawson Mitchell in 1886 in Lisburn to Elizabeth (née Pounden) and the Rev. George P. Mitchell. She studied chemistry at the Royal College of Science, Dublin, the only woman in her class, and graduated in 1908. She spent a year teaching in Waterford before returning to Belfast to take up a post at Victoria College. She continued to teach there part time, once she became a student of botany at the newly constituted The Queen's University of Belfast, from which graduated with honours in 1912, having won the Dunville Studentship.

She joined the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club in 1909, where she met Arthur Wilson Stelfox—in the year 1911/1912, the pair were listed as the club's joint honorary secretaries. They married in 1914. During their engagement, she was offered a teaching post at The Queen's University, but declined it due to her impending marriage. The couple had three children, two sons and a daughter. One son and their daughter died in childhood.

During World War I the couple worked as fruit-growers in Ballymagee, County Down. They moved to Dublin in 1920, when her husband was offered the job of assistant naturalist in the Natural History Museum there. The family home was on Clareville Road, Harold's Cross. In the early 1920s, with her husband as collaborator, she produced a textbook for primary schools, The National Programme of Rural Science or Nature Study, published by the Educational Company of Ireland. In October 1925, the couple jointly found the first confirmed record of the rare slime mold Diderma lucidum in Ireland, at Powerscourt Waterfall. In 1947 they found the first occurrence of the alpine myxomycete Lepidoderma carestianum in the British Isles, at Ben Lawers; the specimen was not identified until 1965.

He recognised her knowledge, and in 1941 wrote:

That an ant not previously recorded from Ireland should enter the house of one of the few people in the country who would recognise it seems a very remote possibility, yet on the 17th September 1941, such a coincidence happened ... (bringing in the washing after a warm day) my wife found, wrapped in a handkerchief, a small winged hymenopteron, which on examination proved to be a female of the ant.Ponera punctatissima Roger. not previously found in Ireland.

After her husband's 1948 retirement they moved to Newcastle, County Down.

She was one of the few Irish botanists of her time who specialised in Mycetozoa. She collaborated with Margaret Williamson Rea, co-authoring at least one paper with her. Specimens collected by the two women form part of the Stelfox Collection in the herbarium of the Ulster Museum. She also corresponded with Gulielma Lister.

After several months of illness, Margarita Stelfox died on 13 August 1971; her husband died eight months later.

References

1. Praeger, Robert Lloyd (1949). Some Irish Naturalists: A Biographical Note-book. Dundalk: W.Tempest, Dundalgan Press. Archived from the original on 23 January 2015. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
2. ^ "Margarita Dawson Stelfox, 1886-1971". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 17 (9): 296–297. 1973. ISSN 0021-1311. JSTOR 25537622.
3. "Annual Report". Annual Reports and Proceedings of the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club. Belfast Naturalists' Field Club: 484. 1912.
4. Ogilvie, Marilyn; Harvey, Joy (2000). The biographical dictionary of women in science : pioneering lives from ancient times to the mid-20th century. New York: Routledge. p. 1226. ISBN 9781135963439.
5. McMillan, Nora F. "Arthur Wilson Stelfox, 1896 - 1970". Journal of Conchology. 27: 520–522.
6. Stelfox, Arthur Wilson (1941). "An Ant New to the Irish List". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 8: 44. ISSN 0021-1311.
7. Graham; Marcus; Heal. "Arthur Wilson Stelfox, 1883 - 1972". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 17 (9): 285–295.
8. O'Brien, Andrew (2009). "Stelfox, Arthur Wilson". In McGuire, James; Quinn, James (eds.). Dictionary of Irish Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. Rea, Margaret W.; Stelfox, Margarita D. (1917). "Some Records for Irish Mycetozoa". The Irish Naturalist. 26 (4): 57–65. ISSN 2009-2598. JSTOR 25524605.
10. Hackney, Paul (1973). "Additional Notes on the Herbarium of the Ulster Museum". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 17 (9): 318. ISSN 0021-1311. JSTOR 25537631.
11. Stelfox, Margarita D. (1947). "The Mycetozoon Badhamia lilacina Rost. in Ireland". The Irish Naturalists' Journal. 9 (2): 53. ISSN 0021-1311. JSTOR 25533529.
12. Stelfox, Margarita D. (1915). "Myxomycetes from the Dingle Promontory". The Irish Naturalist. 24 (2): 37–39. ISSN 2009-2598. JSTOR 25524336.

• 1886 births
• 1971 deaths
• 20th-century Irish botanists
• People from Lisburn
• Irish mycologists
• Irish women scientists
• Alumni of Queen's University Belfast
• Irish women botanists
• Scientists from County Antrim
• Scientists from County Down