ABSTRACT
The conservation of nature was also a passion of Rothschild. In 1899, Rothschild bought Wicken Fen, a Cambridgeshire remnant of the East Anglian Fens, and handed it over to the National Trust two years later. In Hessen and Oldenburg special attention has been paid to the preservation of primeval forest land; while in the first years of the new century Prussia began to recognize the necessity of protecting nature reserves, and these have since been regularly registered and mapped, Parliament, the Education Department, and the Department of Agriculture and Domains acting conjointly to assist the movement. Thus, Memmert, an uninhabited island between Juist and Borkum in the German Ocean, is now reserved as a bird sanctuary, with a watcher to look after it during the breeding season; and a tract of salt marsh near Artern perpetuates the plant association of the locality.
