these were brought to his attention, he allowed no petty vanity to stand 

 in the way of their correction. 



There was an amusing case in which some of Marsh's collectors 

 played a trick on Cope. He Was out in the Bridger country working 

 over the same ground as one of Marsh's parties. He noticed that these 

 men scratched and dug at a certain spot and then went away without 

 taking up anything. His curiosity aroused, he went over to see what 

 had interested the other collectors and found the rather poor specimen, 

 which they had abandoned as not worth taking, but Cope thought 

 otherwise and dug it out of the enclosing rock. It was part of a skull, 

 so badly weathered that only the base of it remained, together with 

 some loose, scattered teeth. The teeth belonged to quite a different 

 animal from the skull and had been "planted" by Marsh's men. Cope 

 was completely deceived and, when he got the specimens home, he 

 gave the fragment a hurried inspection and published the description 

 of a new species with that skull and those teeth. 



Some years later, I wanted to find out just what that species was, 

 for I could make nothing out of the description. Accordingly, I went 

 to Cope's house in Philadelphia and, seeing the questionable specimen, 

 I said: "In our collection there is the base of a skull just Hke this, except 

 that it has the teeth in place and they prove that these teeth do not 

 belong to this skull." Cope would not immediately admit the error, 

 though he remembered and told me the episode of Marsh's men and 

 granted the possibility of their having put the teeth with the skull. At 

 last, I said: "Let me take this skull with me and compare it with ours." 

 "All right," he replied, "take it along." A few days later, when he 

 visited me, I laid the two skulls side by side and asked him to point 

 out any differences between them. After making a careful comparison, 

 he said: "You're right; those fellows fooled me. Now all I ask is that 

 you let me make the correction myself," which, of course, I was glad 

 to do. 



When I first made Cope's acquaintance, he still had the fortune which 

 he inherited from his father; unfortunately he invested it in silver mines 

 which, for a time, gave him a very large income and then gave out 

 completely. In that time of impoverishment, he once said to me: "I don't 

 know where my next month's board is coming from." An appointment 

 in the University of Pennsylvania rescued him from this extremity, 

 but I fancy the salary was comparatively small, for he always seemed 

 to be in narrow circumstances. Nevertheless, he clung to the Aryjerican 

 Naturalist which he had bought in his prosperous days and which gave 



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