Al4 The American Naturalist. [May, 
EDWARD DRINKER COPE. 
Professor Edward Drinker Cope died at his home in Philadelphia, 
April 12, 1897. He was born in Philadelphia, July 28, 1840. His 
family belonged to the Society of Friends, and was one of the old- 
est in the State ; his ancestor, Oliver Cope, being one of the associates of 
William Penn in the establishment of the colony. His gree: 
Thomas Pym Cope, was one of the merchant princes of the city. 
He received his early education at the hands of a private tutor and 
inthe Westtown Academy. In these early years he had a great love for 
nature ; soon it grew into an overpowering passion, and he fairly haunted 
the museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and here he began his 
investigations. We cannot here catalogue the long series of papers— 
nearly a thousand in number—which followed, but it may be of interest 
to know that the first one was published when its author was not nine- 
teen years’ old, and dealt in a masterly way with the classification of 
the salamanders. | 
In 1859 he studied the reptiles in the Smithsonian Institution, re- 
turning the next year to Philadelphia to work again for three years in 
the Academy. Then followed for one year study in Europe; not the 
study of to-day under the direction of a professor, but study of the speci- 
mens in the greater museums from London to Vienna. 
Upon his return to America in 1864 he accepted the professorship of 
«Comparative Zoology and Botany” in Haverford College, where, he 
remained until compelled by ill-health to resign in 1867. It is interest. 
ing to look over the Haverford Catalogues of those years and to see how 
thoroughly his courses were comparative, or what to-day is called 
morphological; and how little they had in common with the descriptive 
zoology and the analytical botany then taught in almost every Amer- 
ican college. 
During these early days his spare moments were devoted to the 
reptiles, and to the very last these forms held a prominent place in his 
work. Unlike his American predecessors he realized that there was 
more in a snake, a lizard or a frog than scales and color pattern; he 
knew that they had brains and viscera and skeletons, and even before 
he was twenty-five he had worked out a classification of the Anura, 
which is still the basis of all subsequent work. 
It was this study of the skeleton which fitted him, in 1866, to take up 
the reptiles found in the marl pits (greea sand) of New Jersey, and this 
