EDWARD DRINKER COPE 327 



According to Osborn "as early as 1868 it may be said that he 

 had laid the foundations for five great lines of research, which he 

 pursued concurrently to the end of his life." Four of these per- 

 taining to natural history, are fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and 

 mammals. 



Very briefly I shall present opinions concerning his contributions 

 in these branches of zoology. 



Of his knowledge of fishes, Osborn, his ever-faithful friend, says: 

 "Cope's work in ichthyology would alone have given him high 

 rank among zoologists." According to Gill, than whom no more 

 competent authority is possible, "as early as 1864, Cope became 

 interested in the fresh water fishes of the United States and from 

 then on published descriptions and enumerations of many species." 

 Some of the most interesting genera of North America were origi- 

 nally made known by him. He was the first to describe the rich- 

 ness of the cyprinoid and especially the catastomoid fauna of 

 North Carolina. But his greatest work was on classification. 

 Almost from the first he set aside the superficial characters which 

 had been employed in the arrangement of fishes, sympathizing 

 keenly with the morphological study which his colleague, Theo- 

 dore Gill, was then actively developing. While in Vienna, in 1863, 

 he purchased a large collection of fish-skeletons from all parts of 

 the world which was most useful to him in his comparative study 

 of the various forms. In 1870, he published a paper in which he 

 maintained that the primary divisions of the Telostomi are indi- 

 cated by their fin structure. He established the fundamental 

 division of the living fishes into five groups, just as they stand at 

 the present day, upon cranial and fin structure. In 1884 he pro- 

 posed an Elasmobranch subclass, Ichthyotomi, based on the 

 Permian Diplodus, which is firmly established, and in 1889 he 

 proposed the suborder Ostracodermi which is also now accepted. 

 His views with but slight modifications have received the ap- 

 proval of A. Smith Woodward of the British Museum who is 

 accepted as the best informed living student of extinct forms of 

 fishes. Cooe continued his studies on fishes until the close of 

 his life and his final opinions and additions to the taxonomy and 



