Arthur Stanley Hirst

Arthur Stanley Hirst (1883 – 4 May 1930) also known as Stanley Hirst, was an English arachnologist and myriapodologist on the staff of the British Museum, and was an authority on Arachnida, especially Acari (ticks and mites) Myriapoda.

Born in Hackney, where his father practiced medicine, Hirst was educated at the Merchant Taylor's School, and studied zoology at the University College London.

In October 1905 he was appointed as an assistant at the British Museum, where he at first worked on the mammal collection and shortly after was put in charge of the Arachnida and Myriapoda collections, succeeding Reginald Innes Pocock. With the abundant material he had at his disposal, he initially described new spiders, harvestmen, scorpions and millipedes, but soon worked mainly on mites and ticks. He also did some work on the spiders of Australia, the islands of the Indian Ocean, India and Africa.

In 1927 ill health forced him to leave the museum and go to Australia and a drier climate, where he continued his Acari studies at the University of Adelaide. He was succeeded as head of the arachnids section by Susan Finnegan, the first woman to be appointed to a post at the Natural History Museum. In April 1930, taking advantage of an improvement in his health, Hirst set off to return to England, but died at sea before arriving in Colombo.