COPE, Edward Drinker, American zoolo gist and palmontologist: b. Philadelphia, Pa., 28 July 1840; d. there, 12 April 1897. Oliver Cope came to this country from Wiltshire, Eng land, about 1687 and settled on Naaman's Creelc in the northernmost part of the State of Dela ware. Oliver's grandson, Caleb, a member of the Society of Fnends, was burgess of, Lancas ter, Pa., in 1776, and incurred the indignation of his fellow-townsmen for offering the hospi talities of his house to Captain (afterward Major) Andre and other British prisoners captured at Saint John's, Canada, by General Montgomery. Caleb's son, Thomas Pim Cope, settled in Philadelphia, and established the Cope packet line, trading between that city and Liver pool. Thomas Pim Cope's son Alfred married Hannah Edge and was the father of the subject of this sketch.
During the first seven years of Edward's life he was educated at home, and gave early proofs of a restless inquisitiveness and an ac curacy of reasoning on what he had observed, very rare in so young a child. At 13 he entered. the Friends' School at Westtown, Chester County, Pa. As a young man of 18 he an nounced to his family that he was to be a naturalist.
His father tried to make a farmer of him, and for this purpose gave him a farm near Coatesville, Pa. He learned much of the flora and fauna of this region, but revolted at the thought of settling down to this monotonous life. He longed to grapple with the larger problems of biology, and broadly hints this in a letter of 1858: °Dr. Leidy is getting up a great work on comparative anatomy?) . . . °Such a work will be very useful to those who want to go to the bottom of natural history; it is an interesting study, too, to notice the modifi cation in form, the degradations, substitu tions, etc., among the internal organs and bones. The structure, forms and positions of the teeth, too, are interesting to notice, so invariably are they the index of the economy and the position in nature of the animal.
In 1859 he published his first paper on the Division of the Salamandrida.' He became a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1861. He had had his wish to attend Leidy's lectures, and this same year he spent some time with Gill, Ken nicott, Meek and Horatio Wood in the museums of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. He greatly admired professors Henry, Baird and Arnold Guyot. He was astounded that Guyot believed in the resurrection of the body. He published 6 scientific papers in 1860; 9 in 1861; 13 in 1862; 4 in 1863; 5 in 1864; 10 in 1865; 11 in 1866. These were almost exclusively printed in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences and were largely on herpe tology. In 1866 he became a member of the American Philosophical Society, and thence forward published largely in this society's pro ceedings. Altogether, counting his editorials in the American Naturalist, and five posthumous publications, his life yielded 1,281 separate papers on scientific subjects. The following
statement of his work is taken from Prof. Henry F. Osborn's article in Science for 7 May 1897.
As early as 1868 he laid the foundations for five great lines of research on the following subjects: Fishes, Amphibians, Reptiles, Mani malia and Philosophy. He unconsciously fol lowed Lamarck in ascribing to conscious effort the adaptive changes in species, and this at the age of 28. In 1869 he struck the keynote of all his later evolution in the sentence, °Intelligent choice may be regarded as the originator of the fittest, while natural selection is the tribunal to which all the results of accelerated growth are submitted' He accepted the term Neo Lamarcician as properly describing his position, which was that, while very many specific char acters are adaptive, few generic characters are so, but these latter are the results of the accel eration or retardation of one plan of ment preordained by the Creator. As in the case of Huxley, Haeckel and many other naturalists of the last century, his career started in zoology, but led inevitably to palaeontology, as it always must with a man of research so broad of view. Osborn says Cope's work in ichthyology would alone have given him high rank among zoologists. Baur says no naturalist ever published so many papers on the taxonomy, morphology and paleontology of the amphibia. His work on the Mammalia and Reptilia was immense. At the time of his death Cope had personally named and described 1,115 out of 3,200 known species of fossil vertebrates of North America, or 34.8 per cent.
He was elected professor of natural science at Haverford College in 1864; was made a member of the National Academy of Science in 1872; received the Bigsby gold medal from the Geological Society of London in 1879; was elected to membership in the Imperial Society of Moscow in 1886; received the degree of Ph.D. from Heidelberg University on the occa sion of the celebration of its 500th anniversary, and was elected professor of geology and palaeontology at the University of Pennsylvania the same year. In 1891, on motion of Dr. Leidy, he was awarded the Hayden memorial medal. He was president of the American Society of Naturalists in 1895, and president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the time of his death. For his titles and those of all of Professor Cope's publica tions, consult