i897. EDWARD DRINKER COPE. 381 



directions, and that all modifications ultimately depended on the 

 mechanical conditions of the environment. Palaeontology, according 

 to him, proved beyond all doubt that characters thus acquired were 

 inherited. Still further, he promulgated the doctrine, that this 

 development of new characters takes place by an acceleration or 

 retardation in the growth of the parts changed ; that, in fact, the adult of 

 an ancestral organism is the exact parallel of an immature stage in its 

 descendant, which only advances or becomes degraded in certain 

 characters during the latest phase of its growth. He was also the 

 first to point out, as the result of these premisses, that the genera of 

 systematists, as commonly understood, are often polyphyletic. Accord- 

 ing to him, it is the species that are permanent, while genera are but 

 our expression of various grades of organisation through which many 

 species pass. The environment moulds species into genera, and 

 genera into families ; and a genus or a family by no means contains 

 forms that are of necessity descended from a common ancestor. 



Finally, and not unnaturally. Cope wandered into the domain of 

 mental phenomena, and applied his principles to these. He believed 

 that consciousness preceded the form in which we are accustomed to 

 witness its manifestation, namely organic tissue. His latest definition 

 of life was : — " Energy directed by sensibility, or by a mechanism 

 which has originated under the direction of sensibility." 



Cope received the degree of A.M. from the University of 

 Pennsylvania, and Ph.D. from that of Heidelberg ; but the honorary 

 distinctions conferred upon him were few compared with those which 

 fall to the lot of most workers of his eminence. He was elected a 

 Corresponding Member of the Zoological Society of London in 1864, a 

 Foreign Correspondent of the Geological Society of London in i88t. 

 He also received the Bigsby Medal of the latter Society in 1879. He 

 was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and was elected 

 President of the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science in 1895. His closest connections were always with the 

 University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Academy of Natural 

 Sciences, to which bodies he has left all his valuable scientific 

 collections. 



Further interesting facts relative to this remarkable man will be 

 found in the excellent account by Professor H. F. Osborn in Science 

 for May 7, while appreciative notices by Dr. Persifor Frazer and 

 Professor J. S. Kingsley are given in the American Naturalist for May, 

 accompanied by a very complete series of portraits. Our own plate 

 is from a photograph taken of Professor Cope in 1895, shortly after 

 he had ceased growing a beard. 



A. Smith Woodward. 

 Natural History Museum, London, S.W. 



