212 Lull — Development of Vertebrate Paleontology. 



jealous rivalry was largely removed. The most manifest 

 result of Cope's western work was the publication in 

 1883 of his Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the 

 West, which formed volume 3 of the quarto publications 

 of the Hayden Survey. This huge book contains more 

 than 1000 pages and 80 plates and has been facetiously 

 called "Cope's Bible." 



Cope's philosophical contributions, which covered the 

 domains of evolution, psychology, ethics, and meta- 

 physics, began in 1868 with his paper on The Origin of 

 Genera. In evolution he was a follower of Lamarck, and 

 as such, with Hyatt, Ryder, and Packard, was one of the 

 founders of the so-called Neo-Lamarckian School in 

 America. Cope 's principal contribution, set forth in his 

 Factors of Organic Evolution, is the idea of kinetogenesis 

 or mechanical genesis, the principle that all structures 

 are the direct outcome of the stresses and strains to 

 which the organism is subjected. Weismann's forcible 

 attack on the transmission theory did not shake Cope's 

 faith in these doctrines, for he claimed that the paleon- 

 tological evidence for the inheritance of such characters 

 as are apparently the result of individual modification 

 was too strong to be refuted. Cope was more like 

 Lamarck than any other naturalist in his mental make-up 

 as well as his ideas. He was also, like Haeckel, given 

 to working out the phylogeny of whatever type lay before, 

 him, and in many instances arrived marvellously near the 

 truth as we now see it. 



Associated for a while with A. S. Packard, Cope soon 

 became chief editor and proprietor of the American Nat- 

 uralist, which was for many years his main means of pub- 

 lication and thus served our science in a way comparable 

 to the Journal. As Osborn says byway of summation: 



"Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist in Paleon- 

 tology. After Huxley he was the last representative of the old 

 broad-gauge school of anatomists and is only to be compared 

 with members of that school. His life-work bears marks of great 

 genius, of solid and accurate observation, and at times of inac- 

 curacy due to bad logic or haste and overpressure of work. 

 . . . As a comparative anatomist he ranks both in the range 

 and effectiveness of his knowledge and his ideas with Cuvier and 

 Owen. . . . As a natural philosopher, while far less logical 

 than Huxley, he was more creative and constructive, his meta- 

 physics ending in theism rather than agnosticism." 



