LIFE AND WORKS OF COPE. V 



this firm, was a man of very active intellect, and showed 

 rare judgment in Edward's education. 



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, 1857, 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 draw- 

 ings, measurements and descriptions of several larger birds, 

 but especially the figure of the entire skeleton of an Icthyo- 

 saur, with this quaint memorandum : " Two of the scle»" 

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

 the age of ten he was taken upon a longer voyage to the 

 West Indies. It is not improbable that these voyages ex- 

 erted a lasting influence upon him. 



The principal impression he gave in boyhood was of in- 

 cessant activity in mind and body, of quick and ingenious 

 thought, reaching in every direction for knowledge, and of 

 great independence in character and action. It is evident 

 that he owed far more to 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 geographi- 

 cal studies. His natural talent for languages may have 

 been cultivated 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 Academy of Natural Sciences. 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 knowl- 



