270 



THE MUSEUM. 



the edges of the "scent raiser." Then 

 with our hands or a stick we would 

 roll him over, shake him, and in some 

 cases beat him with a switch, and the 

 beetles inside, in the fur or anywhere 

 about him would hurry out to see 

 what was the matter. 



It is a good plan to place some bag- 

 ging or cloth of some kind on or near 

 the bodies as these will sometimes af- 

 ford hiding places for beetles which 

 would not stay on the animal itself. 



We collected many specimens of 

 Frox itnistriatus from a piece of bag- 

 ging which had been over the cat long 

 after all of the feline except the bones 

 had disappeared. 



A few small stones placed near the 

 bodies will often be an aid also. Many 

 small Nitiditlidcv will be found hiding 

 under these. 



We obtained the best lesults from 

 carrion placed in quite open woods "in 

 spots where man seldom trod," al- 

 though in different localities this may 

 not be the rule. During the latter 

 part of May and through June the 

 beetles were most abundant. 



The Silphida were the most com- 

 mon, especially .S. noveloracensis and 

 5. iiiacqnalis. Many Staphylinidtv 

 and Nitidnlida- were found as well as 

 some Ni'crop/tori, Histcrida- and Dfi-- 

 mcstida'. 



1 would advise every Coleopterist to 

 try this method of collecting, which I 

 think yields more good coleoptera than 

 any other I ever tried, although it is 

 not quite as pleasant work. 



F. P. Drowne. 



Edward Drinker Cope 



BY MARCUS BENJAMIN, PH. D. 



American science honors its repre- 

 sentatives by an election to the Na- 



tional Academy of Sciences or by an 

 election to the presidency of the 

 American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science. This year the last 

 named organization is fortunate in 

 having as its presiding officer a scien- 

 tist who is also a member of the Na- 

 tional Academy, for it was at its 

 Springfield meeting last summer that 

 Prof. Edward Drinker Cope, who ranks 

 among the foremost of American pal- 

 eontologists, was chosen to preside 

 over its forthcoming Buffalo meeting. 



Prof. Cope was born in Philadel- 

 phia., Pa., on July 28, 1840, of dis- 

 tinguished American ancestry. His 

 great-grandfather was Caleb Cope, a 

 Quaker of Lancaster, Pa. , who pro- 

 tected the ill-fated Major Andre from 

 a mob in 1775. His son, Thomas 

 Pym Cope, whose line of ships made 

 regular trips across the ocean, found- 

 ed the great linen house in Philadel- 

 phia, which on his retirement passed 

 into the hands of his sons Henry and 

 Alfred, who then formed the well 

 known firm of Cope Brothers. Prof. 

 Cope is the son of the younger of 

 these two brothers. 



His academic education was acquir- 

 ed at Westtown Academy and at the 

 University of Pennsylvania, but he did 

 not graduate and turned his attention 

 to science. He studied comparative' 

 anatomy in the Academy of Sciences, 

 in Philadelphia, and in 1859 he joined 

 the group of young naturalists who- 

 were associated together in the Smith-- 

 sonian Institution under Prof. Baird, 

 Their names are best recalled by the 

 following stanza, improvised by one of 

 their number, after a hotly contested 

 argument on some disputed point in 

 natural history: 



