MEMOIR OF EDWARD D. COPE. 401 
The following memoirs of deceased Fellows were read : 
MEMOIR OF EDWARD D. COPE 
BY WILLIAM B. SCOTT 
~ Professor Cope’s attention was first attracted to science by his obser- 
vation of animals, and to this, his first love, he remained true through- 
out his marvelously energetic and productive career. While he was a 
naturalist in the broadest sense of that term and felt the keenest interest 
in every branch of science, yet his own investigations were almost in- 
variably connected, directly or indirectly, with the problems of life, with 
the structure, functions, development, and phylogenetic descent of ani- 
mals, as well as with the broad metaphysical questions which underlie 
and condition all those problems. The pursuit of these investigations 
early led him to turn his attention to paleontology as affording the surest 
and indeed the only sure method of determining the successive modi- 
fications by which the assemblage of living beings has come to be what 
we see it today. The explorations of the Hayden Survey had opened a 
new world of extraordinary wealth and promise to the paleontologist, 
and into the pioneer work of examining this new world Cope threw him- 
self with all his characteristic energy and zeal. Doubtless the greatest 
and most enduring monument to his fame will prove to be the gigantic 
work which he accomplished among the extinct vertebrates of the Far 
West, the biological aspects of which are the most important. 
Inextricably involved in this great task were the investigations which 
he made in geology. These investigations were, in his own eyes, alto- 
gether subordinated to paleontological ends, and hence we find that he 
has comparatively little to say concerning structural or dynamical prob- 
lems, but that he regarded every geological question from the strictly 
historical point of view. It was in stratigraphy, in determining the lim- 
its, distribution, succession, and geological date of the formations and in 
correlating them with their equivalents in other parts of the world, that 
his geological work lay. He recognized the all-important fact that the 
phylogenies of the various animal groups could be made out only after 
the true chronological order of succession of the genera composing the 
phyletic series had been determined. 
When Cope began his studies the western region was still a compara- 
tively new, and for the most part, geologically unexplored country, and 
in many instances the paleontologist was compelled perforce to turn 
geologist and work out the stratigraphical succession for himself. Not 
that Cope was by any means alone in this task, but in his own peculiar 
field he had to rely principally upon his own observations, which was 
an extremely fortunate circumstance, The greater part of Leidy’s pale- 
