Undoubtedly the most brilliant palæontologist of America and one of the most brilliant scientists America has produced. This biography fittingly follows that of Joseph Leidy, although there is the greatest possible contrast between the life and works of the two men: Cope, brilliant, daring, combative; Leidy, patient, persistent, cautious, conservative. It was a contrast between the temperamental Gaelic and the stable Teutonic type. The work of both men will endure for all time. That of Cope requires constant emendation and revision, but it leaves a firm and broad foundation for our knowledge of the evolution of the vertebrata. Leidy was a master of detail, of accurate description, of finished workmanship, rarely venturing generalization, but he left a treasure-house of splendidly collected facts.

The work of Professor Cope began in 1859, a most favorable year, when comparative anatomy first felt the impetus of Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” He was then only nineteen, and for thirty-eight years thereafter his active genius hastened our progress in the knowledge and classification of all the great divisions of the vertebrata. He passed away on April 12, 1897, at the age of fifty-seven, in the full vigor of his intellectual powers, leaving a large part of his work incomplete. Almost at the last he contributed several reviews to The American Naturalist, and on the Tuesday preceding his death he sent to the press the Syllabus of his lectures before the University of Pennsylvania, containing his latest opinions regarding the arrangement and evolution of the vertebrata.

Edward Drinker Cope was born in Philadelphia July 28, 1840, of distinguished American ancestry. His grandfather, Caleb Cope, was the staunch Quaker of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who protected Major André from mob violence. Thomas Pim Cope, his grandfather, founded the house of Cope Brothers, famous in the early mercantile annals of Philadelphia. His father, Alfred, the junior member of the firm, was a man of very active intellect and showed rare judgment in Edward’s education.

Together the father and son became brisk investigators, the father stimulating by questions and by travel the strong love of nature and of natural objects which the son showed at an unusually early age. In August, 1857, they took a sea voyage to Boston, and the son’s journal is full of drawings of jellyfish, grampuses, and other natural objects seen by the way. When eight and a half years old he made his first visit to the Museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences, “on the 21st day of the 10th Mo., 1848,” as entered in his journal. He brought away careful drawings, measurements, and descriptions of several larger birds, but especially the figure of the entire skeleton of an ichthyosaur, with this quaint memorandum: “Two of the sclerotic plates look at the eye—thee will see these in it.” At the age of ten he was taken upon a longer voyage to the West Indies. It is not improbable that these voyages exerted a lasting influence upon him.

The principal impression he gave in boyhood was of incessant activity in mind and body, of quick and ingenious thought, reaching in every direction for knowledge, and of great independence in character and action. It is evident that he owed far more to the direct study of nature and to his own impulses as a young investigator than to the five or six years of formal education which he received at school. He was especially fond of map drawing and of geographical studies. His natural talent for languages may have been cultivated in some degree by his tutor, Dr. Joseph Thomas, an excellent linguist, editor of a biographical dictionary. Many of his spare winter hours were passed at the Academy of Natural Sciences. After the age of thirteen the summer intervals of boarding-school life and later of tutoring were filled among the woods, fields, and streams of Chester County, Pennsylvania, where an intimate knowledge of birds was added to that of batrachians, reptiles, and insects. He showed a particular fondness for snakes. One of these excursions, taken at the age of nineteen, is described in a letter to his cousin (dated June 24, 1859), in which, at the close of a charming description of the botany of the region, appears his discovery of a new type:

I traced the stream for a very considerable distance upon the rocky hillside, my admiration never ceasing, but I finally turned off into the woods towards some towering rocks. Here I actually got to searching for salamanders and was rewarded by capturing two specimens of species which I never saw before alive. The first (Spelerpes longicauda) is a great rarity here. I am doubtful of its having been previously noted in Chester County. Its length is 6 inches, of which its tail forms nearly four. The color is deep brownish yellow thickly spotted with black, which becomes confluent on the tail, thus forming bands. To me a very interesting animal—the type of the genus Spelerpes, and consequently of the subfamily Spelerpinæ, which I attempted to characterize in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences. I send thee a copy, with the request that thee will neither mention nor show it,^[10] for—however trifling—I would doubtless be miserably annoyed by some if thee should. Nobody in this country (or in Europe, of ours) knows anything about salamanders, but Professor Baird and thy humble coz., that is, in some respects. Rusconi, the only man who has observed their method of reproduction, has written enough to excite greatly one’s curiosity and not fully satisfy it. With suitable appliances of aquariums, etc., I should like to make some observations. The other salamander I caught was Plethodon glutinosum—the young—remarkable for the great number of teeth that lie together in two patches on the “basisphenoid” bone; about 300 or more.

Another passage gives an insight into his strong opinion, so often expressed afterward, as to what constitutes the real pleasures of life:

Pleasant it is, too, to find one whose admiration of nature and detail is heightened, not chilled, by the necessary “investigation”—which, in my humble opinion, is one of the most useful as well as pleasing exercises of the intellect, in the circle of human study. How many are there who are delighted with a “fine view,” but who seldom care to think of the mighty and mysterious agency that reared the hills, of the wonderful structure and growth of the forests that crown them, or of the complicated mechanism of the myriads of higher organisms that abound everywhere; who would see but little interesting in a fungus, and who would shrink with affected horror from a defenseless toad.

Having passed six summers among the woods and streams of Chester County, Pennsylvania, it is not surprising to find him, at the time this letter was written, perfectly familiar with the plants, birds, snakes, and salamanders of eastern Pennsylvania, and perfectly aware of the rarity of such knowledge. His range extended with astonishing rapidity; first among the living reptiles and amphibians; then among living and palæozoic fishes; then among the great extinct reptiles of New Jersey and the Rocky Mountains; finally among the ancient American quadrupeds. He acquired in turn a masterly knowledge of each type. Irreverent toward old systems, eager and ambitious to replace them by new ones of his own, with unbounded powers of hard work, whether in the field or at his desk, he rapidly became a leading spirit among the workers in the great realm of the backboned creation, both in America and Europe. While inferior in logic, he showed Huxley’s unerring vision of the most distinctive feature in a group of animals, as well as the broad grasp of Cuvier and of Cuvier’s famous English disciple, Owen. While most men of our day are able to specialize among the details of an order, or at most of a class, Cope, at the age of thirty-four, had in his mental horizon at once the five great classes, although since Owen’s time they had been greatly expanded by palæontological discovery. He was thus the last and most distinguished representative of the old school of comparative anatomists. His high pressure of thirty-eight years’ work was not consistent with excelling accuracy. We have often to look behind the returns in using Cope’s work. Yet if it lacks German exactness, French beauty of presentation, and the solidity which marks the best English scientific workmanship, its dominant principles are sound and its chief anatomical generalizations will endure longer than those of either Owen or Cuvier.

With this peculiar fitness for great studies came first the glorious opportunity of entering the unknown western field as a pioneer with Marsh and Leidy. In 1866 he was the first to find along the New Jersey coast remains of the leaping dinosaur, Lælaps aquilunguis, and he anticipated Huxley in comparing these reptiles with the birds. In 1871 he extended his explorations westward into what is now the most arid portion of Kansas, among the remains of the ancient marine monsters, the ram-nosed mosasaur and the sea-serpent, or elasmosaur. Following up the rapid advance of government exploration in the Rocky Mountains between 1872 and 1878, he discovered in New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming the great amphicœlias, the gigantic camarasaurus, and the frill-necked dinosaur agathaumas. As a pioneer in exploration among these giant animals he was obliged to draw his conclusions largely from fragmentary and imperfect materials, leaving the field open to Professor Marsh’s more exhaustive explorations, which were supported by the government. Yet Professor Cope illuminated the incomplete fragments with his reasoning and his fertile imagination. When a bone came into his hands, his first step was to turn it over and over, to comprehend its form thoroughly, and to compare it with its nearest ally, then to throw out a conjecture as to its uses and its relation to the life economy of the animal as a whole. One often found him virtually living in the past, vividly picturing to himself the muddy shores of the Permian seas of Texas, where the fin-back lizards basked, or the great fresh-water expanses of Wyoming and Montana, where the dinosaurs wandered. His conclusions as to the habits and modes of locomotion of these animals, often so grotesque as to excite laughter, were suggestive revivals from the vast deeps of time of the muscular and nervous life which once impelled the mighty bones. It is fortunate that some of this imaginative history has been written down by Mr. Ballou and that, although physically enfeebled by a mortal illness, Professor Cope in his last days was able to convey to Mr. Knight, the artist, his impressions of how these ancient saurians lived and moved.

The second feature of his opportunity was, of course, that this pioneer exploration came early in the age of Darwinism, when missing links, not only in human ancestry, but in the greater chain of backboned animals, were at the highest premium. Thus he was fortunate in recording the discovery in northwestern New Mexico of by far the oldest quadrupeds known, in finding among these the most venerable monkey, in describing to the world hundreds of links—in fact, whole chains—of descent between the most ancient quadrupeds and what we please to call the higher types, especially the horses, camels, tapirs, dogs, and cats. He labored successfully to connect the reptiles with the amphibians and the latter with the fishes, and was as quick as a flash to detect in the paper of another author the oversight of some long-sought link which he had been awaiting. Thus in losing him we have lost our ablest and most discerning critic. No one has made such profuse and overwhelming demonstration of the actual historical working of the laws of evolution, his popular reputation perhaps resting most widely upon his practical and speculative studies in evolution.

Many friends in this country and abroad have spoken of the invigorating nature of his companionship. A life of intense activity, harassed for long periods by many difficulties and obstacles, many of them of his own making, was nevertheless wholly without worry, that destroyer of the mind so common in our country. His half-century’s enjoyment of research, extending from his seventh to his fifty-seventh year, can only be described in its effects upon him as buoyant; it lifted him far above disturbance by the ordinary matters of life, above considerations of physical comfort and material welfare, and animated him with a serene confidence in the rewards which Science extends to her votaries. He exemplified the truth of the words which Peacock puts into the meditation of Asterius:

... while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course, affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid—to maturity, calm and grateful occupation—to old age, the most pleasing recollections and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His days are always too short for his enjoyment; ennui is a stranger to his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.

While working at Cope’s museum-residence at Philadelphia, I have had many queer experiences in the odd, half-Bohemian restaurants which the naturalist frequented. The quality of the meal was a secondary consideration to him, provided it afforded sufficient brain fuel. While eating he always relaxed into pure fun and displayed a large fund of amusing anecdotes of the experiences, mishaps, and frailties of scientists, his own as often as those of others. He worked deliberately and gave his whole mind to one subject at a time, if he considered it of special importance, this power being aided by his remarkable memory of species and of objects long laid aside for future reference. In his field exploration his scientific enthusiasm burned still higher in pursuit of an unknown type or a missing link. Neither horses nor men could keep pace with his indefatigable energy. Heat and alkali-water were totally disregarded. From one of his Bitter Creek Desert trips he returned to Fort Bridger completely exhausted and for weeks was prostrated with fever. Only a short time before his death he laughingly related that after a solemn warning by a physician to avoid horse-back riding and exposure to water, his health had been greatly improved in the course of a summer by three hundred miles’ exercise in the saddle in North Dakota and several weeks’ wading in New Jersey swamps. His house in Pine Street became every year a greater curiosity as the accumulating fossils, books, and pamphlets outtaxed the shelves and began to thicken like stratified deposits upon the floor in dust-laden walls and lanes. Even his sleeping-room was piled to the ceiling, and he closed his eyes for the last time while lying upon a bed surrounded on three sides by the loved objects of his life-work.

The most conspicuous feature of Cope’s character from boyhood upward was independence; this was partly the secret of his venturesome and successful assaults upon all traditional but defective systems of classification. Seldom has a face reflected a character more fully than that of Professor Cope. His square and prominent forehead suggested his vigorous intellect and marvelous memory; his brilliant eyes were the media of exceptional keenness of observation; his prominent chin was in traditional harmony with his aggressive spirit. From this rare combination of qualities so essential to free investigation sprang his scientific genius, and, with exceptional facilities of wealth and culture in his early education, he became a great naturalist—certainly the greatest America has produced.

As a comparative anatomist he ranks both in the range and effectiveness of knowledge and ideas with Cuvier and Owen. When we consider the short life of some of the favorite generalizations of these great men he may well prove to be their superior as a philosophical anatomist. His work, while inferior in style of presentation, has another quality, which distinguishes that of Huxley, namely, its clear and immediate perception of the most essential or distinctive features in a group of animals. As a natural philosopher, while far less logical than Huxley, he was more creative and constructive, his metaphysics ending in theism rather than in agnosticism.

Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist. After Huxley he was the last representative of the old broad-gauge school of anatomists, and he is only to be compared with members of that school. His life-work bears the marks of great genius, of solid and accurate observation as well as of inaccuracy due to bad logic or haste and overpressure of work. Although the greater number of his Natural Orders and Natural Laws will remain as permanent landmarks in our science, a large part of his systematic work will require laborious revision and thus is far from standing as a model to the young zoologist.

Appreciation of greatness is a mark of the civilization and culture of a people. Cope’s monumental work, preserved in thousands of notes, short papers, and memoirs, and in three bulky government quartos, constitutes his assurance of enduring fame. Some of his countrymen, and even of his fellow workers, allowed certain of his characteristics to obscure his stronger side in their estimate of him and his work, and during his life he received few of the honors such as foreigners are wont to bestow upon their countrymen of note. When we think more deeply of what really underlies human progress, we realize that only to a few men with the light of genius is it given to push the world’s human thought along, and that Edward Drinker Cope was one of these men.