Arthur Stanley Hirst (often just Stanley Hirst) studied zoology at the University College London. In 1905 he joined the staff of the British Museum (Natural History) as an assistant working on the mammal collection, but soon afterwards was put in charge of the Arachnida and Myriapoda collections. From about 1909 he published descriptions of new spiders, harvestmen, scorpions and millipedes from various regions, including the collections of the Ruwenzori Expedition and the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to the Indian Ocean in 1905. Later he worked mainly on mites and ticks, but also on the spiders of Australia, the islands of the Indian Ocean, India, and Africa. Among his papers were: "Descriptions of new species of African spiders and Solifugae" (1907) and "On a collection of Arachnida and Chilopoda made by Mr S.A. Neave in Rhodesia, north of the Zambezi" (1911). His more comprehensive publications included Species of Arachnida and Myriapoda (scorpions, spiders, mites, ticks and centipedes) injurious to man (1917) and Mites injurious to domestic animals (1922).
In 1927 Hirst left the British Museum for health reasons and moved to the drier climate of Australia, where he continued his studies of mites and ticks at the University of Adelaide. He left Australia for England in April 1930, but died along the way.
Hirst was sent some parasitic mites and ticks, found on rats, by the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, in 1913. He recognised a new genus among them. His descriptions were supposed to have been published in the Records of the Albany Museum, but this does not appear to have happened. Shortly thereafter he published a paper, "On new Solpuga [sun-spiders] from Zululand" in the Annals of the Durban Museum (1914-1917, Vol. 1, pp. 228-229).
