334 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



His last book, published in 1897, was on The Primary Factors of 

 Organic Evolution. In it with his accustomed skill he gives the 

 latest evidence for inheritance of acquired characters. 



Gill says of this work: 



" He evoked ' evidence from embryology,' ' evidence from paleon- 

 tology,' 'evidence from breeding'; he considered the 'characters 

 due to nutrition,' 'characters due to exercise of function,' 'char- 

 acters due to disease,' 'characters due to mutilation and injuries,' 

 and 'characters due to regional influence'; he enquired into the 

 conditions of inheritance,' and he fought against the 'objections 

 to the doctrine of inheritance of acquired characters.' " 



This volume is of interest also as containing his views on many 

 sociological and theological problems. 



A. Smith Woodward of the British Museum in a most admirable 

 sketch of Cope that appeared in Natural Science for June, 1897, 

 sums up his view on philosophy so satisfactorily that even if the 

 statements are of the nature of repetition, I believe them worthy 

 of presentation. 



"Cope believed that all organisms, impelled by some inherent 

 growth-force, which he termed 'Bathmism,' varied in certain 

 definite directions, and that all modifications ultimately depended 

 on the mechanical conditions of the environment. Paleontology, 

 according to him proved beyond all doubt that characters thus 

 acquired were inherited. Still further, he promulgated the doc- 

 trine, 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 premises, that the genera of systematists, as commonly under- 

 stood, are often polyphyletic. According 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 



