316 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



body, tireless as an explorer, early discovering for himself that the 

 greatest pleasure and stimulus of life is to penetrate the unknown in 

 nature. In personal character fearless, independent, venturesome, 

 militant, far less of a quaker in disposition than his Teutonic fellow 

 citizen Leidy. Of enormous productiveness as an editor, conducting 

 the American Naturalist for nineteen years, as a writer leaving a shelf- 

 ful of twenty octavo and three great quarto volumes of original re- 

 search. A man of fortitude, bearing material reverses with good 

 cheer, because he lived in the world of ideas and to the very last 

 moment of his life drew constant refreshment from the mysterious 

 regions of the unexplored. 



In every one of the five great lines of research into which he ven- 

 tured, he reached the mountain peaks where exploration and discovery, 

 guided by imagination and happy inspiration, gave his work a leader- 

 ship. His studies among fishes alone would give him a chief rank 

 among zoologists, yet among amphibians and reptiles there never has 

 been a naturalist who has published so many papers as Professor Cope, 

 while from 1868 until 1897, the year of his death, he was a tireless 

 student and explorer of the mammals, living and extinct. Among 

 animals of all these classes his generalizations marked new epochs. 

 While far from infallible, his ideas acted as fertilizers on the minds 

 of other men. As a paleontologist, enjoying with Leidy and Marsh 

 that Arcadian period when all the wonders of our great west were new, 

 from his elevation of knowledge which enabled him to survey the whole 

 field, with keen eye he swooped down like an eagle upon the most 

 important point. 



In breadth, depth and range we see in Cope the very antithesis 

 of the modern specialist, the last exponent of the race of the Buffon, 

 Cuvier, Owen and Huxley type. Of ability, memory and courage 

 sufficient to grasp the whole field of natural history. As comparative 

 anatomist he ranks with Cuvier and Owen; as paleontologist with 

 Owen, Marsh and Leidy — the other two founders of American paleon- 

 tology; as natural philosopher less logical but more constructive than 

 Huxley. America will produce men of as great, perhaps greater, 

 genius, but Cope represents a type which is now extinct and never will 

 be seen again. 



