body, tireless as an explorer, early discovering for himself that the greatest pleasure and stimulus of life is to penetrate the unknown in nature. In personal character fearless, independent, venturesome, militant, far less of a quaker in disposition than his Teutonic fellow citizen Leidy. Of enormous productiveness as an editor, conducting the American Naturalist for nineteen years, as a writer leaving a shelfful of twenty octavo and three great quarto volumes of original research. A man of fortitude, bearing material reverses with good cheer, because he lived in the world of ideas and to the very last moment of his life drew constant refreshment from the mysterious regions of the unexplored.
In every one of the five great lines of research into which he ventured, he reached the mountain peaks where exploration and discovery, guided by imagination and happy inspiration, gave his work a leadership. His studies among fishes alone would give him a chief rank among zoologists, yet among amphibians and reptiles there never has been a naturalist who has published so many papers as Professor Cope, while from 1868 until 1897, the year of his death, he was a tireless student and explorer of the mammals, living and extinct. Among animals of all these classes his generalizations marked new epochs. While far from infallible, his ideas acted as fertilizers on the minds of other men. As a paleontologist, enjoying with Leidy and Marsh that Arcadian period when all the wonders of our great west were new, from his elevation of knowledge which enabled him to survey the whole field, with keen eye he swooped down like an eagle upon the most important point.
In breadth, depth and range we see in Cope the very antithesis of the modern specialist, the last exponent of the race of the Buffon, Cuvier, Owen and Huxley type. Of ability, memory and courage sufficient to grasp the whole field of natural history. As comparative anatomist he ranks with Cuvier and Owen; as paleontologist with Owen, Marsh and Leidy—the other two founders of American paleontology; as natural philosopher less logical but more constructive than Huxley. America will produce men of as great, perhaps greater, genius, but Cope represents a type which is now extinct and never will be seen again.
