THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST 
Voi. XXXI, October, 1897. 37° 
EDWARD DRINKER COPE, NATURALIST—A CHAP- 
TER IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: 
By THEODORE GILL. 
L 
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion, dear, 
Compels me to disturb your season due; 
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his time, 
Our Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. 
On the morning of the 13th of April, in a car on my way 
from a funeral in New York to Washington, a newspaper 
notice of the death, the day before, of my old friend, E. D. 
Cope, caught my eye. Shocked by the intelligence, I dropped 
the paper, and memory recalled various incidents of our long 
acquaintance, 
The threnody of Milton? in commemoration of his friend 
Edward King, also rose to recollection, and the lines just 
quoted seemed to me to be peculiarly fitted for the great man 
Just dead. He was, indeed, no longer young and had attained 
his prime, but he had planned work for many years to come, 
! Address by the retiring President of the American Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science at the Detroit Meeting, August 9th. Also printedin ‘* Sci- 
ence,” August 13, 1897, and in the “Scientific American Supplement,” Aug. 14, 
28, Sept. 4, 11, 1897. 
*Milton, Poems, XVII. 
*In the extract from Milton’s poem, time has been substituted for prime, and 
our for young, 
57 
