A century of science in America

by Unknown

Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897).

The third great name in American vertebrate paleontology, that of Edward Drinker Cope, stands out in sharp contrast with the other two, although in the range of his interests he was probably more nearly comparable with Leidy than with Marsh. The beginning of Cope’s scientific labors dates from 1859, the year made famous in the annals of science by the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species. It is not surprising, therefore, that matters evolutional should have interested him to the very end of his career. Cope was not merely a paleontologist, but was interested in recent forms, especially the three lower classes of vertebrates, to such an extent that his work therewith is highly authoritative and in some respects epoch-making. Thirty-eight years of almost continual toil were his, and the mere mass of his literary productions is prodigious, especially when one realizes that, unlike those of a writer of fiction, they were based on painstaking research and philosophical thought. The greater part of Cope’s life was spent in or near Philadelphia except for his western explorations, and he is best known as professor of geology and paleontology in the University of Pennsylvania, although he served other institutions as well.

Cope’s early work was among the amphibia and reptiles, his first paleontological paper, the description of Amphibamus grandiceps, appearing in 1865. This year he also began his studies of the mammals, especially the Cetacea, both living and extinct, from the Atlantic seaboard. The next year saw the beginning of his work on the material from the Cretaceous marls of New Jersey, describing therefrom one of the first carnivorous dinosaurs, Lælaps, to be discovered in America. In 1868 Cope began to describe the vertebrates from the Kansas chalk and three years later made his first exploration of these beds. This led to his connection with the United States Geological Survey of the Territories under Hayden, and to continued exploration of Wyoming and Colorado in 1872 and 1873. The material thus gained, consisting of fishes, mosasaurs, dinosaurs, and other reptiles, was described in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society as well as in the Survey Bulletins. In 1875 these results were summarized in a large quarto volume entitled “Vertebrata of the Cretaceous formations of the West.” Subsequent summers were spent in further exploration of the Bridger, Washakie, and Wasatch formations of Wyoming, the Puerco and Torrejon of New Mexico, and the Judith River of Montana. The material gathered in New Mexico proved particularly valuable, and led to the publication in 1877 of another notable volume entitled “Report upon the Extinct Vertebrata obtained in New Mexico by Parties of the Expedition of 1874.”

Material was now accumulating so fast as to necessitate the concentration of Cope’s own time on research, so that, while he continued to make brief journeys to the West, the real work of exploration was delegated to Charles H. Sternberg and J. L. Wortman, both of whom became subsequently very well known, the former as a collector whose active service has not yet ceased, the latter as an explorer and later an investigator of extremely high promise.

As early as 1865, Cope began no fewer than five separate lines of research which he pursued concurrently for the remainder of his career. On the fishes, he became a high authority in the larger classification, owing to his researches into their phylogeny, for which a knowledge of extinct forms is imperative. On amphibia, he wrote more voluminously than any other naturalist, discussing not only the morphology but the paleontology and taxonomy as well. In this connection must be mentioned not only Cope’s exploration and collections in the Permian of Ohio and Illinois, but especially the remains from the Texas Permian, first received in 1877, upon which some of his most brilliant results were based; these of course included reptilian as well as amphibian material. His third line of research, the Reptilia, is in part included in the foregoing, but also embraced the reptiles of the Bridger and other Tertiary deposits, those of the Kansas Cretaceous, and the Cretaceous dinosaurs.

Up to 1868 Leidy alone was engaged in research in the West, but that year saw the simultaneous entrance of Marsh and Cope into this new field of research, and their exploration and descriptions of similar regions and forms soon led to a rivalry which in turn developed into a most unfortunate series of controversies, mainly over the subject of priority. This resulted in a permanent rupture of friendship and the division of American workers into two opposing camps to the detriment of the progress of our science. This breach has now been happily healed, and for a number of years the degree of mutual good will and aid on the part of our workers has been of the highest sort.

The extent of the western fossil area, and particularly the explorations of three of Cope’s aids, Wortman in the Big Horn and Wasatch basins, Baldwin in the Puerco of New Mexico, and Cummins in the Permian of Texas, gave him so fruitful a field of endeavor that the occasion for jealous rivalry was largely removed. The most manifest result of Cope’s western work was the publication in 1883 of his Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West, which formed volume 3 of the quarto publications of the Hayden Survey. This huge book contains more than 1000 pages and 80 plates and has been facetiously called “Cope’s Bible.”

Cope’s philosophical contributions, which covered the domains of evolution, psychology, ethics, and metaphysics, began in 1868 with his paper on The Origin of Genera. In evolution he was a follower of Lamarck, and as such, with Hyatt, Ryder, and Packard, was one of the founders of the so-called Neo-Lamarckian School in America. Cope’s principal contribution, set forth in his Factors of Organic Evolution, is the idea of kinetogenesis or mechanical genesis, the principle that all structures are the direct outcome of the stresses and strains to which the organism is subjected. Weismann’s forcible attack on the transmission theory did not shake Cope’s faith in these doctrines, for he claimed that the paleontological evidence for the inheritance of such characters as are apparently the result of individual modification was too strong to be refuted. Cope was more like Lamarck than any other naturalist in his mental make-up as well as his ideas. He was also, like Haeckel, given to working out the phylogeny of whatever type lay before him, and in many instances arrived marvellously near the truth as we now see it.

Associated for a while with A. S. Packard, Cope soon became chief editor and proprietor of the American Naturalist, which was for many years his main means of publication and thus served our science in a way comparable to the Journal. As Osborn says by way of summation:

“Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist in Paleontology. After Huxley he was the last representative of the old broad-gauge school of anatomists and is only to be compared with members of that school. His life work bears marks of great genius, of solid and accurate observation, and at times of inaccuracy due to bad logic or haste and overpressure of work.... As a comparative anatomist he ranks both in the range and effectiveness of his knowledge and his ideas with Cuvier and Owen.... As a natural philosopher, while far less logical than Huxley, he was more creative and constructive, his metaphysics ending in theism rather than agnosticism.”