EDWARD DRINKER COPE

PALEONTOLOGIST

1840-1897

BY MARCUS BENJAMIN

In the history of American science there will be found the names of many who have devoted their lives to the study of natural history. Indeed, according to Goode, Henry Harriot who accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on his voyage to Virginia in 1584 and thereafter compiled a Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, which is full of interest to the naturalist, was "the first English man of science who crossed the Atlantic." He is described as "a man of wide culture a botanist, zoölogist, and anthropologist." From his time to the present there have been many who have followed in his footsteps and among them the names of Say, Leidy, Dana, Agassiz, Baird, and Newberry stand out conspicuously in the front rank, like planets among the stars.

As knowledge grew, men more and more devoted themselves to specialities, and from naturalists there were differentiated those who studied living forms and those who occupied themselves with fossil life, and then zoologists and paleontologists were recognized, and now with the everlasting growth of knowledge there are ornithologists, ichthyologists, conchologists, lepidopterists, coleopterists, carcinologists, and many others who devote themselves exclusively to some one of the almost infinite gradations into which natural science has resolved itself.

The student of history who recalls the era when the great transcontinental surveys were made to locate a favorable possible railway route that should extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific

will remember that each of these surveys was accompanied by a scientist whose duties were the collection of objects in natural history. These railway surveys were succeeded by the four great scientific surveys which flourished in the seventies of the nineteenth century and were consolidated into the United States Geological Survey in 1879, and the practice of employing trained scientists in connection with their work continued. Among those who have gained high reputation in consequence of this development no one occupies a higher place than Edward Drinker Cope of whom also more than of his contemporaries, it may be said that he "possessed those brilliant mental qualities which are the natural endowment of genius." It is the pleasant mission of the following pages to present his contributions to science.

The Cope family is a distinguished one in the annals of Philadelphia, and in the charming romances that Dr. Weir Mitchell has written so delightfully about the early days in the Quaker City, the name Cope frequently occurs. He tells pleasantly in one of his books how during an epidemic of yellow fever in 1793, Mr. Cope heroically remained in Philadelphia when flight was considered the best policy and devoted his attention to the victims of the plague. It was Mr. Cope also who four years later when the smallpox raged accepted the task of ministering to the wants of the destitute and carried food to the homes of the sufferers.

According to the records of the family Oliver Cope came from Wiltshire, England, about 1687, and settled at Naaman's Creek in the extreme north of what is now the state of Delaware. The original grant of land is dated September 8, 1681, and recites that William Penn of Worminghurst in the county of Sussex, Esquire, in consideration of five shillings, etc., conveys to Oliver Cope of Awbry in the county Wilts tailor, two hundred and fifty acres of land within the province of Pennsylvania.

Oliver's grandson was Caleb Cope, who, in 1761, removed to Lancaster and later settled in Philadelphia. While serving as burgess of Lancaster in 1776, the unfortunate Major André, who had been captured at St. Johns, Upper Canada, by General Montgomery and sent with other British prisoners to Lancaster, arrived

in the little town. In spite of the popular excitement against these prisoners of war Caleb Cope offered them an asylum in his home and protected them against the vengeance of a mob which attacked his residence. He is said to have been a member of the Society of Friends and an opponent of the war against England. His son, Thomas Pim Cope, began a commerical career in Philadelphia in 1786, and four years later he established himself in the business of importing. His success was very great and soon warranted him in purchasing his own vessels. This venture likewise proved successful, and in 1821 he inaugurated the first line of packets that ran between Philadelphia and Liverpool, which then continued until about the beginning of the Civil War. His sons, Henry and Alfred, succeeded to the business, and in time the firm assumed the name of Cope Brothers.

Edward Drinker Cope was the eldest son of Alfred Cope and his wife, Hannah Edge. He was born in Philadelphia on July 28, 1840, while his father was yet active in business, but as the child grew to boyhood the family removed to Germantown and there the father, who was a man of cultivated literary taste, freed from the active interests of his commercial pursuits, lived in ease and devoted himself largely to the bringing up of his son.

At a very early age the boy manifested an active and intelligent interest in nature; when only about seven years old during a sea voyage to Boston with his father he is said to have kept a journal which he filled with drawings of "jelly fish, 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 of his native city; this visit was "on the 21st of the 10th mo. 1848" as entered in his journal. He brought away careful drawings, measurements and descriptions of several larger birds, as well as of the skeleton of an ichthyosaurus. His drawing of the fossil reptile bears the explanatory legend in Quaker style: "two of the sclerotic plates: look at the eye, thee will see these in it." At the age of ten he was taken upon a voyage to the West Indies.

His contemporary and lifelong friend, Dr. Theodore Gill, in