706 



SCIENCE. 



LN. S. Vol. V. No. 123. 



all his rare scientific treasures for the bene- 

 fit of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences 

 and the University of Pennsylvania. It is 

 hoped that the following sketch of his early 

 life and brief review of his principal writ- 

 ings will give some idea of his genius and 

 of his position in the world of science. 



Edward Drinker Cope was born in Phila- 

 delphia, July 28, 1840, of distinguished 

 American ancestry.* His great-grandfather, 

 Caleb Cope, is said to have been the staunch 

 Quaker of Lancaster, Pa., who protected 

 Major Andre from mob violence. Thomas 

 Pim Cope, his grandfather, founded the 

 house of Cope Brothers, famous in the early 

 mercantile annals of Philadelphia. His 

 father was Alfred, the junior member of the 

 firm, a man of very active intellect, who 

 showed rare judgment in Edward's educa- 

 tion. Together the father and son became 

 brisk investigators, the father stimulating 

 by questions and by travel the strong love 

 of nature and of natural objects which the 

 son showed at an unusually early age. 



In August,. 1847, they took a sea voyage 

 to Boston, and the son's journal is full of 

 drawings of jellyfish, grampuses 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, ' on the 21st day of the 

 10th Mo., 1848,' as entered in his journal; 

 he brought away careful drawings, meas- 

 urements and descriptions of several larger 

 birds, but especially the figure of the entire 

 skeleton of an Icthyosaur, with this quaint 

 memorandum : " Two of the sclerotic plates 

 look at the eye — thee will see these in it." 

 At the age of ten he was taken upon a 

 longer voyage to the West Indies. Thus 

 the child was in a remarkable degree the 



*In the preparation of this article the writer is in- 

 debted to several members of Professor Cope's family, 

 also to Professor Bashford Dean and to Professor 

 George Baur. The latter has contributed especially a 

 section upon the Reptilia. 



father of the man. The principal impres- 

 sion he gave in boyhood was of incessant 

 activity in mind and body, of quick and 

 ingenious thought, reaching in every direc- 

 tion for knowledge, and of great independ- 

 ence in character and action. It is evident 

 that he owed far more to paternal guidance 

 in the direct study of nature and to his own 

 impulses as a young investigator than to 

 the five or six years of formal education 

 which he received at school. He was 

 especially fond of map drawing and of 

 geographical studies. His natural tal- 

 ent for languages may have been culti- 

 vated in some degree by his tutor. Dr. 

 Joseph Thomas, an excellent linguist, editor 

 of a biographical dictionary. Many of his 

 spare winter hours were passed at the Acad- 

 emy. After the age of thirteen the summer 

 intervals of boarding school life and later 

 of tutoring were filled among the woods, 

 fields and streams of Chester county. Pa., 

 where an intimate knowledge of birds was 

 added to that of batrachians, reptiles and 

 insects. He always showed a particular 

 fondness for snakes. One of these excur- 

 sions, taken at the age of nineteen, is de- 

 scribed in a letter to his cousin (dated June 

 24, 1859) ; at the close of a charming de- 

 scription of the botany of the region ap- 

 pears his discovery of a new type : 



"I traced the stream for a very considerable dis- 

 tance upon the rooky hillside, my admiration never 

 ceasing, but I finally turned off into the woods to- 

 wards some towering rocks. Here I actually got to 

 searching for Salamanders and was rewarded by 

 capturing two specimens of species which I never 

 before saw alive. The first {Spelerpes longicauda) is 

 a great rarity here. I am doubtful of its having been 

 previously noted in Chester county. Its length is 6 

 inches, of which its tail forms nearly four. The color is 

 deep brownish yellow, thickly spotted with black, 

 which becomes confluent on the tail, thus forming 

 bands. To me a very interesting animal — the type 

 of the genus Spelerpes, and consequently of the sub- 

 family Spelerpinoe, which I attempted to characterize 

 in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Acad- 

 emy of Natural Sciences. I send thee a copy, with 



