226 
heard of the new devotee of science and read 
his article with as much interest as my own. 
A well-equipped man had evidently come 
upon the field and this was the first of the 
numerous articles that were destined to ap- 
pear in an uninterrupted flow for nearly 
four decades. A few months afterwards I met 
the author in Philadelphia at the Academy. 
A young man, nineteen years old, about 
5 feet 9 or 10 inches high, with head carried 
somewhat backwards and of rather robust 
frame, stood before me; he had an alert, 
energetic manner, a pronounced, positive 
voice, and appeared to be well able to take 
his part in any trouble. His knowledge 
was by no means confined to herpetology, 
but covered a wide range of science, and” 
his preliminary education had been good. 
We afterwards met from time to time in 
Philadelphia and Washington and found we 
had many sympathies in common and some 
differences. 
In one of our first interviews we had 
quite an argument on the nature of the 
family group in zoology, resulting from criti- 
cisms I made on the extended scope he had 
given to that category in the classification 
of the Salamanders. Another controversy, 
I remember, had reference to the vertebral 
theory of the skull. In anarticle on the veno- 
mous serpents, published in the Proceedings 
of the Academy for 1859, he had defined 
the group in terms involving the adoption 
of that theory,and I ventured to dissent 
from its reality. I had myself been much 
impressed with it in former days and when 
16 years old had copied in colors an illus- 
tration of Owen’s so-called archetype repro- 
duced in Carpenter’s Physiology. Subse- 
quently, however, the fact that there was 
only an approximation to the realization of 
it in the most specialized of fishes and not 
at all among the lower or higher vertebrates, 
with other considerations, turned me from 
it, and I gave my reasons for dissent to 
Cope. Ultimately he admitted the force of 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Vou. VI. No. 137. 
the argument and also abandoned the theory 
at one time so popular in England and 
America. 
Our acquaintance, thus begun in 1859, 
continued uninterruptedly till death di- 
vided us. We rarely met, indeed, that we 
did not express difference of opinion respect- 
ing some subject, but the difference was 
never of a serious nature and generally lit- 
tle more than sufficient to enliven inter- 
course. 
sy es 
The future naturalist was born in Phila- 
delphia on the 28th of July, 1840, and the 
name Edward Drinker was given to him. 
He was the descendant of a prosperous line 
long established in Pennsylvania. His 
father, Alfred, was a man of cultivated lit- 
erary taste and did much to train his son’s 
mind in early youth. He had retired from 
active business and lived in luxurious ease 
in Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia. 
There he had formed an arboretum con- 
taining most of the American trees which 
would thrive in the climate of that region. 
Amidst such surroundings the youthful 
Cope grew up. 
An active and intelligent interest in Na- 
ture became manifest at a very early age. 
When only about seven years old, during a 
sea voyage to Boston with his father, the 
boy is said to have kept a journal which 
he filled with drawings of ‘jelly fish, gram- 
puses and other natural objects seen by the 
way.’ When eight and a half years old he 
made his first visit to the Museum of the 
Academy of Natural Sciences of his native 
city ; this visit was on the ‘‘21st day of the 
10th Month, 1848,” as entered in his journal. 
He brought away careful drawings, measure- 
ments and descriptions of several larger 
birds, as well as of the skeleton of an Ich- 
thyosaurus. His drawing of the fossil rep- 
tile bears the explanatory legend in Quaker 
style: “two of the sclerotic plates look at. 
the eye—thee will see these in it.” 
