40 Biology in America 



as palaeontologist and thereafter worked under its auspices. 

 His expeditions took him into the western plains country and 

 the Rocky Mountains, where he discovered the remarkable 

 birds with teeth, Hesperornis and Ichthyornis, and a host of 

 dinosaurs, the lizard-like reptiles, many of them giants of the 

 animal world, whose bones have been unearthed in such 

 numbers on our western plains, and are now reposing in so 

 many museums both here and abroad, and whose biographies 

 fill so many ponderous volumes on the shelves of our libraries. 

 Here too he collected a series of skeletons of fossil horses 

 which has furnished one of the strongest evidences for evolu- 

 tion known, and which served to recast the views regarding 

 the descent of the horse which were current at that time. 

 In 1876 when Huxley visited America, he spent a week with 

 Marsh inspecting his collections of fossils at Yale. Huxley 

 was at this time preparing to deliver a lecture in New York 

 on the evolution of the horse, and as a result of his study 

 of the Yale collections this lecture was largely rewritten. 

 When Marsh had brought out box after box of specimens to 

 illustrate various points in their discussion, Huxley finally 

 turned to him and said, "I believe you are a magician; 

 whatever I want, you conjure it up." 



As a further result of this conference Huxley predicted 

 the discovery of the then unknown five-toed ancestor of the 

 horse, and sure enough, less than two months later Professor 

 Marsh ' ' dug up ' ' the renowned Eohippus in the Eocene strata 

 of the West. 



Cope, one of the most indefatigable, brilliant and versatile 

 of American biologists, was born and died in Philadelphia. 

 When a young man he served as professor of natural science 

 in Haverford College, later becoming connected with the 

 government surveys of the territories under Wheeler and 

 Hayden. For several years he was curator of the Academy 

 of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and finally professor of 

 geology in the University of Pennsylvania. In the literature 

 of modern fishes, and especially of reptiles and amphibians, 

 Cope's work will ever be classic, but it was chiefly in the 

 field of vertebrate palaeontology that he became famous. As 

 a member of government surveys and the Philadelphia 

 Academy his work on the fossil vertebrates of the West was 

 both able and voluminous, and contributed largely not alone 

 to his own fame, but to that of the institutions which he 

 represented. As illustrative of American idealism, a trait 

 for which our people have not hitherto received due credit, 

 it is both pleasant and stimulating to think of Cope on his 

 deathbed putting the finishing touches on his report upon 



