SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 607 



pendent Cope. We are fortunate to have a fine biography of Baird by his long- 

 time associate in Washington, the malacologist W. H. Dall. 



Baird's untiring efforts to promote the growth of the great museum he helped 

 to found, and his unselfish furtherance of the careers of others left him less 

 known to succeeding generations than was the brilliant but sometimes erratic 

 Edward Drinker Cope (b. 1840, d. 1897). Like Baird, and like most other herpe- 

 tologists of the last century. Cope worked in many fields and is remembered 

 quite as much for his explorations and publications in paleontology and for his 

 studies on fishes as for his contribution to herpetology. Some of his more solid 

 accomplishments were herpetological. They include his discovery of the pro- 

 found difference between the true frogs and the true toads in the anatomy of the 

 shoulder girdle and sternum, which made possible the first real advance in the 

 classification of the whole group of tailless amphibians. Museum specimens were 

 long jealously guarded against dissection, and their classification, it was thought, 

 should be sufficiently accomplished by the examination of external characters. 

 Cope's discovery, which required the laying back of the skin of the breast in 

 order to determine the classification of a specimen in hand, ran counter to museum 

 practice. During his European tour in 1863, when he visited the Museum of 

 Zoology of the University of Berlin under the guidance of the still conservative 

 Wilhelm Peters, it is said that Cope carried an open penknife in his hand and 

 surreptitiousl}' examined the pectoral girdles of genus after genus of frogs that 

 had previously been unknown to him. These he could then place correctly into 

 the two great series Arcifera (for those with overlapping coracoid bones or carti- 

 lages) and Firmisternia, with the coracoids firmly anchored to a median sternum. 

 His early paper "Sketch of the Primary Cxroups of Batrachia salientia" (1865) 

 sets forth this cornerstone of amphibian classification (see especially, however, G. 

 K. Noble, below) . 



In addition to the continuous flow of small and large papers from Cope's pen, 

 mainly in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 

 and the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Cope's major herpet- 

 ological works were The Batrachia of North America (1889) and The Crocodil- 

 ians, Lizards, and Snakes of North America, which appeared in 1900, three years 

 after his death. Both works incorporated large blocks of manuscript descrip- 

 tions left by Baird. The second of these works exhibits a special direction of 

 Cope's interest, namely the extremely varied structure of the paired copulatory 

 organs of snakes, the hemipenes, which he figured for no less than 235 species in 

 his Classification of the Ophidia (1895). The structure of the hemipenis, though 

 subject to recurrent parallel or convergent evolution, and thus significant mainly 

 at the generic level, has required the attention of herpetologists interested in the 

 taxonomy of snakes ever since. 



Cope's last service to American Natural History was as editor-in-chief of the 

 American Naturalist, 1887-1897. This gave him a ready outlet for short notes 

 and comments, as editorials and reviews. Osborn, his biographer, aptly compares 

 him with Lamarck; Cope was indeed a "neo-Lamarckian," believing firmly in 

 evolution, but equally in evolution through direct influence of the environment. 

 His mind was brilliant and polemical rather than scholarly and constructive, or, 

 for that matter, critical. It gave off ideas and published papers like a fountain; 

 his bibliography lists no less than 1,395 titles. Allowing for all his carelessness 



