EDWARD DRINKER Cope, the Editor-in-Chief and sole 
l proprietor of this journal, died on Monday morning, April 12, 
1897, shortly before 8 o’clock. 
What this simple announcement means to the world of 
science we shall only begin to appreciate when the notices of 
his life in the scientific journals of Europe reach us, for highly 
as he was honored by some of the leaders of scientific thought 
in this country there is not so general an appreciation here as 
abroad of the services he has rendered to Natural History. 
Those who were nearest to him, and who witnessed the growth 
of his own knowledge of a particular subject from the few iso- 
lated facts, with which his study began, to the complete develop- 
ment of his monographs, in which the object stood out from the 
honestly and easily won. These were quick, and accurate pow- 
ers of observation and discrimination, a marvelous memory em- 
bracing the minutest details of what had been done in the same 
direction before, and tireless perseverance and industry amount- 
ing to a complete forgetfulness of self and neglect of mere 
personal comfort when in quest of accurate data. But the 
great world of readers and workers did not need this personal 
knowledge to judge of how he worked. It is scarcely credible 
that the monument which he has unconsciously reared to him- 
self by his unceasing additions to human knowledge has been 
created in his short lifetime of fifty-six years, and the larger 
part of it in the face of difficulties which alone would have 
crushed et other man. 
Nor was “species making” his only or even his chief con- 
tribution to the world’s knowledge. With his power of instan. 
aneously extracting from the well-filled treasury of his mind 
that group of facts which he needed, and his systematic inspec- 
tion of the salient characters of an object, it was as easy for him 
to designate what was new to science in a mass of material just 
unpacked as for the ordinary naturalist to indicate the parts 
which were new to himself. In Cope’s case the two were usu- 
ally synonymous. 
