Chapter IV: Part 4

The second movement begins six centuries before Christ in the inquiring mind of the West, which is always characterized by intense curiosity about nature. This movement is the search for natural law. Its rapid progress among the Greeks terminates with the fall of Greece. It is expressed in Cato’s reply to Scipio: “My wisdom consists in the fact that I follow Nature, the best of guides, as I would a God and am loyal to her commands.” After nineteen centuries it revives with Copernicus and Galileo and culminates in Darwin. Man is again perceived as a part of nature; in the study of nature man finds intellectual delight; in the laws of nature man finds his physical well-being; man through nature becomes the redeemer of physical man.

The Augustinian theology was imbued with a deeply theistic view of nature, a view which the modern Church professes but does not profoundly believe nor live by. As shown by Aubrey Moore, Augustine was entirely sound in counselling the entire separation of these two great lines of thought, the natural and the spiritual. “It very often happens,” says Augustine, “that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world ... respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or observation [that is, a natural philosopher], and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a Christian, speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever, perceiving him to be as wide from the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.”

Augustine held what may be regarded as a pristine faith in nature as a manifestation of the divine. This pristine theistic view is founded on passages in Genesis, especially Genesis 2:15 and Genesis 3:19:

And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to
dress it and to keep it. (Genesis 2:15.)

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto
the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto
dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19.)

These passages show that nature, typified by the garden, gives man his sustenance, and yet, as it has to be won by the sweat of the brow, man’s energy or art must work with nature. These passages, as Bishop Boyd-Carpenter observes in his inspiring studies of Dante, are also the foundation of the famous lines in the “Divine Comedy” in which the poet expresses the relation between the theistic view of nature and scientific or philosophical inquiry.

... He thus made reply:
“Philosophy, to an attentive ear,
Clearly points out, not in one part alone,
How imitative Nature takes her course
From the celestial Mind, and from its art:
And where her laws[6] the Stagirite unfolds,
Not many leaves scann’d o’er, observing well,
Thou shalt discover that your art on her
Obsequious follows, as the learner treads
In his instructor’s step; so that your art
Deserves the name of second in descent
From God. These two, if thou recall to mind
Creation’s holy book,[7] from the beginning
Were the right source of life and excellence
To humankind....”

The preceding is Cary’s version.[8] Another version of this passage is that of Longfellow.[9]

“Philosophy,” he said, “to him who heeds it,
Noteth, not only in one place alone,
After what manner Nature takes her course
From Intellect Divine and from its art;
And if thy Physics carefully thou notest,
After not many pages shalt thou find,
That this your art as far as possible
Follows, as the disciple doth the master,
So that your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild.
From these two, if thou bringest to thy mind
Genesis at the beginning, it behooves
Mankind to gain their life, and to advance.”

As Bishop Boyd-Carpenter remarks, Virgil’s answer to Dante is to this effect: We learn from philosophy that the operations of nature proceed directly from God, and those of art indirectly, because art consists in the imitation of nature. (“Inferno,” XI, pp. 97–105, Longfellow’s translation.) Again, the Bible teaches us that it is by these two principles, nature and art, that the system of man’s life should be ordered. (“Inferno,” XI, pp. 106–108.)

If we are guided by the spirit of Augustine and of Dante we cannot fail to see that the Church has passed through a very critical period of scepticism as regards nature. This is perhaps an original view of scepticism, but there is no way of evading its application; if nature represents the wisdom and goodness of God, to be blind to its interpretation is a form of scepticism—devout and well-intentioned though it may be. Especially the Roman Church has been led away from its pristine faith in nature as a manifestation of the divine, while the Protestant Church, in consequence of this loss of faith during the nineteenth century, has suffered a loss of influence in the world which it will require a long period to regain. If the laws of nature are manifestations of the divine power and wisdom, as we proclaim in our services, the attitude of the Church toward these laws should not be hesitant, defensive, or apologetic, but active, receptive, and aggressive.

Considered in this way, the great scientific inquiry of the latter half of the nineteenth century, so far from being regarded as destructive, is a constructive, purifying and regenerating movement; it takes us back to the lost faith of our fathers, a faith which spiritualized the Old Testament, a faith which finds in nature a manifestation of the divine order of things. Pasteur showed the way to the physical redemption of man, as Newton had opened to us the new heavens and Darwin the new earth. If we were to rewrite the Litany in the twentieth century, for the passage, “From plague, pestilence, and famine, good Lord, deliver us,” we should read, “From ignorance of Thy Laws and disobedience of Thy Commands, good Lord, deliver us.”

From the standpoint of this older teaching of Augustine and Dante the life-work of Louis Pasteur was more than humanitarian, it was more than scientific; it was religious. He regarded natural processes which in their superficial view appear relentless, cruel, wholly inexplicable, as part of a possibly beneficent order of things; he again revealed through his profound insight, through his unparalleled toil, discouragement, and even scorn on the part of his contemporaries, deeper laws, which are beneficent, protective, and restorative in action. He was the evangelist of Osler’s “third gospel”: “And the third gospel, the gospel of his body, which brings man into relation with nature—a true _evangelion_, the glad tidings of a conquest beside which all others sink into insignificance—is the final conquest of nature, out of which has come man’s redemption of man....

“If in the memorable phrase of the Greek philosopher Prodicus, ‘that which benefits human life is God,’ we may see in this new gospel a link betwixt us and the crowning race of those who eye to eye shall look on knowledge, and in whose hand nature shall be an open book, an approach to the glorious day of which Shelley sings so gloriously:

Happiness
And Science dawn though late upon the earth;
Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reason and passion cease to combat there,
Whilst mind unfettered o’er the earth extends
Its all-subduing energies, and wields
The sceptre of a vast dominion there.”

Should we not institute a new order of sainthood for men like Pasteur? Could we find one more eminent for consecration, piety, and service in life and character than this devout investigator? Entrance to this order would be granted to those who through the study of Nature have extended the bounds of human knowledge, have bestowed incomparable blessings on the human race, have relieved human suffering, have saved or prolonged human life. Would not a statue of Louis Pasteur in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine proclaim the faith of the modern Church that the two great historic movements of Love and of Knowledge, of the spiritual and intellectual and the physical well-being of man, are harmonious parts of a single and eternal truth? On the base of such a statue might be inscribed the words written by Pasteur in the most perplexing period of his life:

“GOD GRANT THAT BY MY PERSEVERING LABORS I MAY BRING A LITTLE STONE TO
THE FRAIL AND ILL-ASSURED EDIFICE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THOSE DEEP
MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND DEATH WHERE ALL OUR INTELLECTS HAVE SO
LAMENTABLY FAILED.”

_From a photograph by Gutekunst_

JOSEPH LEIDY
]

JOSEPH LEIDY
1823–1891

Joseph Leidy may be known as the founder of vertebrate palæontology in
America, since he followed the pioneers in this branch of science, in
which America has become so famous, and since he was succeeded by
Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh. Leidy and Cope were the very
last representatives in America of the older school of naturalists and
anatomists, who covered a very broad field. They both covered this
field with consummate ability. In studying Leidy’s life we observe him
as a master of detail, whereas Cope was a master of generalization.
Their devotion to the _École des Faits_ rendered most distinguished
service to American science.

JOSEPH LEIDY, FOUNDER OF VERTEBRATE PALÆONTOLOGY IN AMERICA

I ask the indulgence of the members of this gathering in honor of Joseph Leidy and fellow workers in the fields of science if I present what I have to say in an informal manner, and I trust that you will not for a moment imagine that, because it is presented informally, I do not appreciate the honor conferred upon me in asking me to speak on this historic occasion in reference to a man for whom I have such great admiration as for Joseph Leidy. I shall not repeat except in a very general way the homage that was paid to Leidy in the series of important and penetrating addresses which we have listened to today, but I shall endeavor to present a summary, especially along the lines of palæontology and comparative anatomy, of some of the distinctive features of his work in comparison with those of the men who accompanied and immediately followed him, and to show what great results have come from his efforts as a pioneer and as a founder of this most interesting and fascinating branch of science in America.

Leidy started with an entirely new world of life; he soon learned that he could not base his study of American fossils on the work of French palæontologists, for the life of our western regions was not known in the Old World. Every specimen represented a new species or a new genus or a new family, and in some cases a new order. Never was there a greater opportunity than was offered to Leidy in this virgin field of our then virgin West. Never was a man more ready to grasp it than that quiet, unpretentious, unassuming, wonderfully gifted observer of nature. It is particularly interesting to review his work, which was written in the exact spirit of Cuvier, and to see his long record of direct observation of the entire extinct fauna not only of the eastern but, especially, of the great western territories. We find today how permanent that work was, how little we have to modify it, how well it stands the test of time, how accurate are his descriptions, how perfect his figures and illustrations, and how even today they form admirable standards for all the work that has been done since. After a continuous series of epoch-making papers and contributions which he was in the habit of contributing year after year, in meeting after meeting of the academy, he brought his initial work to a climax in 1869 when he published his great monograph, “Extinct Mammalian Fauna of Nebraska and Dakota.” That work still ranks in breadth and accuracy as the finest single contribution that has been made to vertebrate palæontology in this country, if not in the world.

Whereas in Leidy we had a man of the exact observer type, Cope was a man who loved speculation. If Leidy was the natural successor of Cuvier, Cope was the natural successor of Lamarck. Leidy, in his contributions to the academy, covered the whole world of nature, from the Protozoa and Infusoria up to man, and he lived as the last great naturalist in the world of the old type who was able by both capacity and training to cover the whole field of nature. Cope, in contrast, mastered—and this mastery in itself was a wonderful achievement—the entire domain of vertebrates from the fishes up. Marsh, with less breadth and less ability, nevertheless was a palæontologist of a very high order and had a genius for appreciating what might be called the most important thing in science. He always knew where to explore, where to seek the transition stages, and he never lost the opportunity to point out at the earliest possible moment the most significant fact to be discovered and disseminated.

It is most interesting to contrast the temperament of these three men, Joseph Leidy, Edward Drinker Cope, and Othniel Charles Marsh. They were as different as any three men could possibly be made, both by nature and nurture. As Professor Edward Smith said, in one of his addresses on Leidy, “scientists are only mortals after all.” Your scientific genius may hitch up with a star on the one hand and with an anchor on the other. Whereas Leidy was essentially a man of peace, Cope was what might be called a militant palæontologist. Whereas Leidy’s motto was peace at any price, Cope’s was war whatever it cost. I do not know that I can find from Shakespeare any characterization of Joseph Leidy, but I think in “Henry IV” there is a pretty good characterization of my friend Edward D. Cope:

I am not yet of Percy’s mind, the Hotspur of the north; he that kills
me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands,
and says to his wife, “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.”

Perhaps there was a scientific providence in all this; perhaps such antagonistic spirits were necessary to enliven and disseminate interest in this branch of science throughout the country. This subtle combative quality in a palæontologist is a strange quality; it is a strange inversion, because the more ancient and difficult the study, the more refractory the fossil, the greater the animation of discussion regarding its relationships. From this subtle ferment there arose the famous rivalry which existed not between Leidy and either of the others, because it was impossible to quarrel with Leidy, but between Cope, the descendant of a Quaker family, and Marsh, the nephew of a great philanthropist. When I took up the subject as a young man and first came to the City of Brotherly Love I always expected to learn of some fresh discussion, some recent combat; it was even in the shade of the Academy of Natural Sciences that one found echoes of these convulsive movements. I remember one day coming into the dignified halls of the academy and finding two of the youthful attendants engaged in hot discussion over a dispute they had overheard at a meeting of the academy the night before.

Leidy, after the characterizations that we have heard of his life from Conklin, Jennings, Scott and others, occupied a pivotal position, a very interesting pivotal position. He was in an intellectual environment and more or less in a social environment entirely different from our own. This is very important to keep in mind in estimating his work. In spirit he was, I think, a true pre-Darwinian in the sense of seeking what may be called facts for Darwin and in the breadth and scope of his researches. But he lived in an entirely different intellectual atmosphere from that which surrounds our scientific world of today; he was a John the Baptist for Charles Darwin. We must remember that twelve years before Darwin brought forth the “Origin of Species” this young man was beginning to assemble a mass of data which would have been of great value to the great British naturalist. As shown by Professor Scott, he was tracing the ancestral lineage of the horse, the camel, the rhinoceros, the tapir family, the titanotheres, and last, but not least, the anatomical forebears of man.

Nevertheless, Leidy was an evolutionist _sub rosa_; he was an evolutionist without ever using the word evolution. There is no doubt about that when you read a citation from his writings such as was selected by Professor Jennings:

The study of the earth’s crust teaches us that very many species of
plants and animals became extinct at successive periods, while other
races originated to occupy their places. This probably was the result,
in many cases, of a change in exterior conditions incompatible with
the life of certain species and favorable to the primitive production
of others.... Living beings did not exist upon the earth prior to
their indispensable conditions of action, but wherever these have been
brought into operation concomitantly, the former originated.... Of the
life, present everywhere with its indispensable conditions, and coeval
in its origin with them, what was the immediate cause? It could not
have existed upon earth prior to its essential conditions; and is it,
therefore, the result of these? There appear to be but trifling steps
from the oscillating particles of inorganic matter to a bacterium;
from this to a vibrio, thence to a monas, and so gradually up to the
highest orders of life! The most ancient rocks containing remains of
living beings indicate the contemporaneous existence of the more
complex as well as the simplest of organic forms; but, nevertheless,
life may have been ushered upon earth, through oceans of the lowest
types, long previously to the deposit of the oldest palæozoic rocks as
known to us.

This really is a sketch in 1847 of environment and survival such as we now know to be the actual course of evolution and was truly anticipatory of modern results, substituting modern language as we may do for the quaint phraseology of the period.

On the subject of the evolution of man especially Leidy certainly had very clear and positive ideas. He caught from Goethe the significance of the occasional reversion and the embryonic suture between the premaxillary and maxillary bones—constituting a single bone in the human subject, two bones in the lower order of mammals. He pointed out this suture in 1847 in the skull of a native from one of the Hollander Islands. In 1849 he pointed out the separate embryonic condition of the intermaxillary bones. In both cases, as was his habit, Leidy obviously saw the significance but, always sticking to facts and a presentation of facts, he let the matter rest there. The most pronounced adumbration, however, of the evolution of man from the primates is to be found in a citation of his volume of 1873, a period when the descent of man was still not recognized:

But little change would be necessary to evolve from the jawbone and
teeth of _Notharctus_ that of the modern monkey. The same condition
that would lead to the suppression of a first premolar tooth in
continuance would reduce the fangs of the other premolars to a single
one. This change with the common teeth shortening and the increase of
the depth of the jaw would give the character of the living South
American monkey. A further reduction would give rise to the condition
of the jaw in the Old World apes and in man.

I do not need to point out that the human jaw, next to the human forehead, is the most significant feature in the transformation from the lower to the higher primates. But some of those here present may not know that a monograph has been written by my successor and colleague, Professor William K. Gregory, upon the genus _Notharctus_ Leidy. Gregory, fifty years after this significant passage was written by Leidy, chose _Notharctus_ as an ideal intermediate type to place in a theoretic ancestral series leading up to man, and in the beautiful series of preparations which he has recently completed showing the development of the human face in all stages from the most remote ancestral facial type to the modern human face, Gregory uses _Notharctus_ as the pivotal point, just as did Leidy fifty years ago.

To return to the matter of Leidy’s intellectual environment: how much we owe today to our intellectual environment, how much we owe to battles which have been fought and won over insufficient evidence! Not battles of words, but battles of facts. Such evidence as that of _Notharctus_ the alert vision of Leidy detected and put in its proper place. In those days “mum” was the word as regards evolution. Neither Cuvier nor Owen, the British successor of Cuvier, nor Louis Agassiz, great naturalists all, had accepted the theory; theologic influence was still all-powerful. Fortunately for Leidy, William Jennings Bryan was still in embryo. Trying to form an historic parallel of William Jennings Bryan, I think it may be found in the figure of King Canute sitting with his court on the shores of Nature, trying to beat back the waves of Truth. If Leidy had lived in the era of Bryan, he undoubtedly would have been classified with Professor Conklin and myself—he would have been made with us a type of a new genus, _Anathema maranatha_, in which, according to the zoology of Bryan, are embraced “tall professors coming down out of trees who would push good people not believing in evolution off the sidewalk.” Leidy would not have been burned at the stake, only because of legal obstacles. Similarly, I think that Professor Conklin and myself owe our lives to the fact that _autos da fé_ in matters of belief are no longer matters of common practice in our civilization!

It is perhaps particularly fitting that Professor Scott and myself were asked to speak at this centenary, for one reason above others. We have been the defendants and supporters of the Leidy tradition. I am not quite sure, but I doubt if you will find in the writings of Professor Cope or Professor Marsh a single allusion to the work of Leidy. I make this statement subject to verification, but I do not recall in their writings a single allusion to the work of Leidy, except a brief tribute by Marsh in an early address; the rivalry between the two men went to such lengths that in their race with each other Leidy was totally forgotten. Every new animal that was discovered was given a new scientific name by each of them. _Notharctus_ Leidy, for example, is exactly the same animal as _Tomitherium_ Cope and _Limnotherium_ Marsh. Thus arose a trinominal system—three names each for the Eocene and Oligocene animals—the original Leidy name and the Cope and Marsh names. It has been the painful duty of Professor Scott and myself to devote thirty of the best years of our lives trying to straighten out this nomenclatural chaos. Even to this day we are verifying the observations of Leidy; we find that he never made an incorrect observation or published an incorrect figure; his accuracy in these regards is one of his greatest and most permanent claims to immortality as a palæontologist.

I do not know that I altogether agree with my friend Conklin in his address as to the relation of extensive and intensive work. If I understand him aright, he rather implies that intensive work is an inevitable feature of modern scientific progress. I would rather cite Leidy as an example of a man who pursued intensive work and extensive work simultaneously and who had the capacity to pursue intensive work in several branches of science, biological and geological, and I would regard the permanence of Leidy’s work as largely the result of the state of mind produced by the breadth of his intensive as well as of his extensive work. I would like to leave on your minds my conviction, buttressed by Leidy’s life, that it will be necessary even for those of our day to maintain the Leidy attitude, because, after all, it is in _the single mind that great hypotheses and theories are generated_. The comparative anatomist, if he dies out, will leave human anatomy impoverished. Today our students should return to the Leidy attitude, as Professor Scott said, of entering palæontology by way of medicine and base our education in human anatomy, as Leidy did, on a broad knowledge of comparative anatomy. This is only one instance out of very many that might be given of the legacies of Leidy to us: namely, that throughout his life his mind had continuously the intensive as well as the extensive attitude. He was able to be on the mountain-top and then descend into the valley, and I believe that while some men who pursue one subject intensively all their lives are making great discoveries, for example, such workers as Professor Michelson, whom we all honor, the chances are that few men can make great discoveries unless they approach the subject broadly and work from more than one angle of thought.

Speaking of immortality, I share rather the Leidy view than the view of Cope. I wish it were possible to resurrect Joseph Leidy and to bring him back into the field of modern American palæontology. I wish it were possible to bring him back to life and to have taken him with me, for example, in a motorcar across the wastes of Mongolia. I can imagine the joy with which he would have welcomed coming upon the remains of the land dinosaurs, recalling his first description of a dinosaur in America, in the very heart of the great Desert of Gobi; and perhaps the still greater joy with which he would have greeted one of his titanotheres, one of the first mammals which he described from Wyoming, out on a great plain on the border of the Desert of Gobi.

The desire for this kind of immortality reminds me often of the Greek poet:

To live like man and yet like nature to endure,
That double gift, to man and nature both denied,
The Gods alone enjoy.

We are rewriting this beautiful Greek verse in the immortality of Leidy’s work, and we are holding up his example for the prevailing spirit of truthfulness, which is, after all, its most characteristic single feature. Would that Leidy and Huxley and Richard Owen and Cuvier and Marsh and Cope could see the heights which have been reached in the branch of science to which they devoted their lives and fortunes. Leidy’s infant science, in which it was most hazardous to make predictions, has now reached the stage which I believe is the finest in the history of any science—the stage of prediction—that, as astronomers have predicted the existence of unknown and unseen planets, palæontologists can also predict unknown and unseen forms of life and, moreover, can point out where they may be found.

Is our palæontological path reaching its goal? I think not. Its final goal will be reached when palæontologists are able through extensive and intensive methods to join hands with workers in other biological fields and when we are able, pursuing our branch in the Leidy spirit, to bring together into one harmony—the harmony which certainly exists, although at present we do not see it—by bringing together into one harmony the great underlying principle, the multiple aspects of which we can sum up in the word “evolution.”

_From a photograph by Gutekunst_

EDWARD DRINKER COPE
]

EDWARD DRINKER COPE
1840–1897

Undoubtedly the most brilliant palæontologist of America and one of
the most brilliant scientists America has produced. This biography
fittingly follows that of Joseph Leidy, although there is the greatest
possible contrast between the life and works of the two men: Cope,
brilliant, daring, combative; Leidy, patient, persistent, cautious,
conservative. It was a contrast between the temperamental Gaelic and
the stable Teutonic type. The work of both men will endure for all
time. That of Cope requires constant emendation and revision, but it
leaves a firm and broad foundation for our knowledge of the evolution
of the vertebrata. Leidy was a master of detail, of accurate
description, of finished workmanship, rarely venturing generalization,
but he left a treasure-house of splendidly collected facts.

The work of Professor Cope began in 1859, a most favorable year, when
comparative anatomy first felt the impetus of Darwin’s “Origin of
Species.” He was then only nineteen, and for thirty-eight years
thereafter his active genius hastened our progress in the knowledge
and classification of all the great divisions of the vertebrata. He
passed away on April 12, 1897, at the age of fifty-seven, in the full
vigor of his intellectual powers, leaving a large part of his work
incomplete. Almost at the last he contributed several reviews to _The
American Naturalist_, and on the Tuesday preceding his death he sent
to the press the Syllabus of his lectures before the University of
Pennsylvania, containing his latest opinions regarding the arrangement
and evolution of the vertebrata.

A GREAT NATURALIST

Edward Drinker Cope was born in Philadelphia July 28, 1840, of distinguished American ancestry. His grandfather, Caleb Cope, was the staunch Quaker of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who protected Major André from mob violence. Thomas Pim Cope, his grandfather, founded the house of Cope Brothers, famous in the early mercantile annals of Philadelphia. His father, Alfred, the junior member of the firm, was a man of very active intellect and showed rare judgment in Edward’s education.

Together the father and son became brisk investigators, the father stimulating by questions and by travel the strong love of nature and of natural objects which the son showed at an unusually early age. In August, 1857, they took a sea voyage to Boston, and the son’s journal is full of drawings of jellyfish, 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, “on the 21st day of the 10th Mo., 1848,” as entered in his journal. He brought away careful drawings, measurements, and descriptions of several larger birds, but especially the figure of the entire skeleton of an ichthyosaur, with this quaint memorandum: “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 longer voyage to the West Indies. It is not improbable that these voyages exerted a lasting influence upon him.

The principal impression he gave in boyhood was of incessant activity in mind and body, of quick and ingenious thought, reaching in every direction for knowledge, and of great independence in character and action. It is evident that he owed far more to the direct study of nature and to his own impulses as a young investigator than to the five or six years of formal education which he received at school. He was especially fond of map drawing and of geographical studies. His natural talent for languages may have been cultivated in some degree by his tutor, Dr. Joseph Thomas, an excellent linguist, editor of a biographical dictionary. Many of his spare winter hours were passed at the Academy of Natural Sciences. After the age of thirteen the summer intervals of boarding-school life and later of tutoring were filled among the woods, fields, and streams of Chester County, Pennsylvania, where an intimate knowledge of birds was added to that of batrachians, reptiles, and insects. He showed a particular fondness for snakes. One of these excursions, taken at the age of nineteen, is described in a letter to his cousin (dated June 24, 1859), in which, at the close of a charming description of the botany of the region, appears his discovery of a new type:

I traced the stream for a very considerable distance upon the rocky
hillside, my admiration never ceasing, but I finally turned off into
the woods towards some towering rocks. Here I actually got to
searching for salamanders and was rewarded by capturing two specimens
of species which I never saw before alive. The first (_Spelerpes
longicauda_) is a great rarity here. I am doubtful of its having been
previously noted in Chester County. Its length is 6 inches, of which
its tail forms nearly four. The color is deep brownish yellow thickly
spotted with black, which becomes confluent on the tail, thus forming
bands. To me a very interesting animal—the type of the genus
_Spelerpes_, and consequently of the subfamily _Spelerpinæ_, which I
attempted to characterize in a paper published in the _Proceedings of
the Academy of Natural Sciences_. I send thee a copy, with the request
that thee will neither mention nor show it,[10] for—however trifling—I
would doubtless be miserably annoyed by some if thee should. Nobody in
this country (or in Europe, of _ours_) knows anything about
salamanders, but Professor Baird and thy humble coz., that is, in some
respects. Rusconi, the only man who has observed their method of
reproduction, has written enough to excite greatly one’s curiosity and
not fully satisfy it. With suitable appliances of aquariums, etc., I
should like to make some observations. The other salamander I caught
was _Plethodon glutinosum_—the young—remarkable for the great number
of teeth that lie together in two patches on the “basisphenoid” bone;
about 300 or more.

Another passage gives an insight into his strong opinion, so often expressed afterward, as to what constitutes the real pleasures of life:

Pleasant it is, too, to find one whose admiration of nature and detail
is heightened, not chilled, by the necessary “investigation”—which, in
my humble opinion, is one of the most useful as well as pleasing
exercises of the intellect, in the circle of human study. How many are
there who are delighted with a “fine view,” but who seldom care to
think of the mighty and mysterious agency that reared the hills, of
the wonderful structure and growth of the forests that crown them, or
of the complicated mechanism of the myriads of higher organisms that
abound everywhere; who would see but little interesting in a fungus,
and who would shrink with affected horror from a defenseless toad.

Having passed six summers among the woods and streams of Chester County, Pennsylvania, it is not surprising to find him, at the time this letter was written, perfectly familiar with the plants, birds, snakes, and salamanders of eastern Pennsylvania, and perfectly aware of the rarity of such knowledge. His range extended with astonishing rapidity; first among the living reptiles and amphibians; then among living and palæozoic fishes; then among the great extinct reptiles of New Jersey and the Rocky Mountains; finally among the ancient American quadrupeds. He acquired in turn a masterly knowledge of each type. Irreverent toward old systems, eager and ambitious to replace them by new ones of his own, with unbounded powers of hard work, whether in the field or at his desk, he rapidly became a leading spirit among the workers in the great realm of the backboned creation, both in America and Europe. While inferior in logic, he showed Huxley’s unerring vision of the most distinctive feature in a group of animals, as well as the broad grasp of Cuvier and of Cuvier’s famous English disciple, Owen. While most men of our day are able to specialize among the details of an order, or at most of a class, Cope, at the age of thirty-four, had in his mental horizon at once the five great classes, although since Owen’s time they had been greatly expanded by palæontological discovery. He was thus the last and most distinguished representative of the old school of comparative anatomists. His high pressure of thirty-eight years’ work was not consistent with excelling accuracy. We have often to look behind the returns in using Cope’s work. Yet if it lacks German exactness, French beauty of presentation, and the solidity which marks the best English scientific workmanship, its dominant principles are sound and its chief anatomical generalizations will endure longer than those of either Owen or Cuvier.

With this peculiar fitness for great studies came first the glorious opportunity of entering the unknown western field as a pioneer with Marsh and Leidy. In 1866 he was the first to find along the New Jersey coast remains of the leaping dinosaur, _Lælaps aquilunguis_, and he anticipated Huxley in comparing these reptiles with the birds. In 1871 he extended his explorations westward into what is now the most arid portion of Kansas, among the remains of the ancient marine monsters, the ram-nosed mosasaur and the sea-serpent, or elasmosaur. Following up the rapid advance of government exploration in the Rocky Mountains between 1872 and 1878, he discovered in New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming the great amphicœlias, the gigantic camarasaurus, and the frill-necked dinosaur agathaumas. As a pioneer in exploration among these giant animals he was obliged to draw his conclusions largely from fragmentary and imperfect materials, leaving the field open to Professor Marsh’s more exhaustive explorations, which were supported by the government. Yet Professor Cope illuminated the incomplete fragments with his reasoning and his fertile imagination. When a bone came into his hands, his first step was to turn it over and over, to comprehend its form thoroughly, and to compare it with its nearest ally, then to throw out a conjecture as to its uses and its relation to the life economy of the animal as a whole. One often found him virtually living in the past, vividly picturing to himself the muddy shores of the Permian seas of Texas, where the fin-back lizards basked, or the great fresh-water expanses of Wyoming and Montana, where the dinosaurs wandered. His conclusions as to the habits and modes of locomotion of these animals, often so grotesque as to excite laughter, were suggestive revivals from the vast deeps of time of the muscular and nervous life which once impelled the mighty bones. It is fortunate that some of this imaginative history has been written down by Mr. Ballou and that, although physically enfeebled by a mortal illness, Professor Cope in his last days was able to convey to Mr. Knight, the artist, his impressions of how these ancient saurians lived and moved.

The second feature of his opportunity was, of course, that this pioneer exploration came early in the age of Darwinism, when missing links, not only in human ancestry, but in the greater chain of backboned animals, were at the highest premium. Thus he was fortunate in recording the discovery in northwestern New Mexico of by far the oldest quadrupeds known, in finding among these the most venerable monkey, in describing to the world hundreds of links—in fact, whole chains—of descent between the most ancient quadrupeds and what we please to call the higher types, especially the horses, camels, tapirs, dogs, and cats. He labored successfully to connect the reptiles with the amphibians and the latter with the fishes, and was as quick as a flash to detect in the paper of another author the oversight of some long-sought link which he had been awaiting. Thus in losing him we have lost our ablest and most discerning critic. No one has made such profuse and overwhelming demonstration of the actual historical working of the laws of evolution, his popular reputation perhaps resting most widely upon his practical and speculative studies in evolution.

Many friends in this country and abroad have spoken of the invigorating nature of his companionship. A life of intense activity, harassed for long periods by many difficulties and obstacles, many of them of his own making, was nevertheless wholly without worry, that destroyer of the mind so common in our country. His half-century’s enjoyment of research, extending from his seventh to his fifty-seventh year, can only be described in its effects upon him as buoyant; it lifted him far above disturbance by the ordinary matters of life, above considerations of physical comfort and material welfare, and animated him with a serene confidence in the rewards which Science extends to her votaries. He exemplified the truth of the words which Peacock puts into the meditation of Asterius:

... while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course,
affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid—to maturity, calm
and grateful occupation—to old age, the most pleasing recollections
and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and
while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the
intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself
independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of
human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His
days are always too short for his enjoyment; ennui is a stranger to
his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices
to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing
and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.

While working at Cope’s museum-residence at Philadelphia, I have had many queer experiences in the odd, half-Bohemian restaurants which the naturalist frequented. The quality of the meal was a secondary consideration to him, provided it afforded sufficient brain fuel. While eating he always relaxed into pure fun and displayed a large fund of amusing anecdotes of the experiences, mishaps, and frailties of scientists, his own as often as those of others. He worked deliberately and gave his whole mind to one subject at a time, if he considered it of special importance, this power being aided by his remarkable memory of species and of objects long laid aside for future reference. In his field exploration his scientific enthusiasm burned still higher in pursuit of an unknown type or a missing link. Neither horses nor men could keep pace with his indefatigable energy. Heat and alkali-water were totally disregarded. From one of his Bitter Creek Desert trips he returned to Fort Bridger completely exhausted and for weeks was prostrated with fever. Only a short time before his death he laughingly related that after a solemn warning by a physician to avoid horse-back riding and exposure to water, his health had been greatly improved in the course of a summer by three hundred miles’ exercise in the saddle in North Dakota and several weeks’ wading in New Jersey swamps. His house in Pine Street became every year a greater curiosity as the accumulating fossils, books, and pamphlets outtaxed the shelves and began to thicken like stratified deposits upon the floor in dust-laden walls and lanes. Even his sleeping-room was piled to the ceiling, and he closed his eyes for the last time while lying upon a bed surrounded on three sides by the loved objects of his life-work.

The most conspicuous feature of Cope’s character from boyhood upward was independence; this was partly the secret of his venturesome and successful assaults upon all traditional but defective systems of classification. Seldom has a face reflected a character more fully than that of Professor Cope. His square and prominent forehead suggested his vigorous intellect and marvelous memory; his brilliant eyes were the media of exceptional keenness of observation; his prominent chin was in traditional harmony with his aggressive spirit. From this rare combination of qualities so essential to free investigation sprang his scientific genius, and, with exceptional facilities of wealth and culture in his early education, he became a great naturalist—certainly the greatest America has produced.

As a comparative anatomist he ranks both in the range and effectiveness of knowledge and ideas with Cuvier and Owen. When we consider the short life of some of the favorite generalizations of these great men he may well prove to be their superior as a philosophical anatomist. His work, while inferior in style of presentation, has another quality, which distinguishes that of Huxley, namely, its clear and immediate perception of the most essential or distinctive features in a group of animals. As a natural philosopher, while far less logical than Huxley, he was more creative and constructive, his metaphysics ending in theism rather than in agnosticism.

Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist. After Huxley he was the last representative of the old broad-gauge school of anatomists, and he is only to be compared with members of that school. His life-work bears the marks of great genius, of solid and accurate observation as well as of inaccuracy due to bad logic or haste and overpressure of work. Although the greater number of his Natural Orders and Natural Laws will remain as permanent landmarks in our science, a large part of his systematic work will require laborious revision and thus is far from standing as a model to the young zoologist.

Appreciation of greatness is a mark of the civilization and culture of a people. Cope’s monumental work, preserved in thousands of notes, short papers, and memoirs, and in three bulky government quartos, constitutes his assurance of enduring fame. Some of his countrymen, and even of his fellow workers, allowed certain of his characteristics to obscure his stronger side in their estimate of him and his work, and during his life he received few of the honors such as foreigners are wont to bestow upon their countrymen of note. When we think more deeply of what really underlies human progress, we realize that only to a few men with the light of genius is it given to push the world’s human thought along, and that Edward Drinker Cope was one of these men.

_From a photograph copyright by Underwood and Underwood_

THEODORE ROOSEVELT
]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1858–1919

In his early life Roosevelt was a warm friend and companion of my
naturalist brother, Frederick. During the last ten years of his life I
became very intimate with him, especially after the writing of my “Age
of Mammals” in 1910, which he read with ardor. Recalling his
experiences as Police Commissioner of the City of New York, in writing
to me of this book he said he enjoyed comparing certain politicians
with whom he was thrown with the hyænodons and certain less desirable
animal citizens of the Tertiary age! It was perhaps this running
parallel between human nature and animal nature which grew on his mind
and caused him to seek my advice when invited to prepare and deliver
the Romanes Lecture at Oxford, which he entitled “Biological Analogies
in History.” He was more kinds of a man than any one I have ever
known—that is, able in more lines.

In this “Impression” I endeavor to show that the scientific side of
Roosevelt’s life is to be taken seriously; that he had unusual ability
as a naturalist and observer, which would have led to a distinguished
career in science had he not been turned to government. Above all
things he desired to be truthful and strictly accurate, and he took
infinite pains not to exaggerate but to present the real facts.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT
NATURALIST

“Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.”
—ROOSEVELT.

Theodore Roosevelt doubtless inherited his natural history bent from his father, who was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History in the year 1869. I had the good fortune to recall young Theodore in his boyhood, because of no life may it more truly be said that “the child is father of the man.” He was one of a youthful band of bird-lovers, observers and collectors, among whom was my brother Frederick, who came together in the seventies. While Frederick confined himself to birds, Theodore was interested also in mammals and small amphibians, and he came back from their collecting trips with all kinds of specimens. Frederick invited Theodore to collect birds with him in the forests of the Hudson River highlands, and on one occasion, when every pocket was full of specimens, Theodore suddenly discovered what he believed to be a new species of frog. Having no other place for it, he put it on top of his head and clapped on his hat. Things went very well until the boys happened to meet the Honorable Hamilton Fish, then Secretary of State, taking his dignified afternoon drive along the Hudson with Mrs. Fish. Of course both boys doffed their hats, whereupon Theodore’s frog, tired of confinement, made a spring forward! That the youthful collector recovered and replaced the frog as soon as the Secretary’s carriage was out of sight illustrates one of Roosevelt’s great characteristics as a naturalist—to collect at all hazards, at any amount of personal inconvenience. Like the young Darwin, who brought back a species of bug in his mouth because he had no more space in his pocket, the boy Roosevelt never let an opportunity pass and finally became one of the greatest of American collectors. In a letter to me dated December 9, 1914, he wrote:

My memory is that I was one of the group who founded the Linnæan
Society, although it was then a very small society and my part was
humble and inconspicuous. As a boy I worked in the museum and
specifically remember skinning some rather reddish white-footed mice
which I thought were golden mice and was much disappointed to find
that they were not. Fred and I worked under Bell and sometimes visited
the museum together and did work there. Bell’s shop was down town on
Broadway. I remember very well once being allowed to look over a large
number of South American mice in the museum when I was a small boy and
appealing to Mr. Bickmore to know how I could get at the relationship
of the South American mice with our northern mice of the same family.
Fred and I did much about the same kind of work but I was much more
interested than he was in the book part of it.

Roosevelt’s boyish collection of birds led to his initial training under Bell, a well-known taxidermist of New York at that time, and, still more unusual, to his discovery of a new species of bird and the preparation of his first scientific paper describing it.[11] This illustrates another characteristic, which is lacking in many naturalists, namely, the desire to publish as promptly as possible and to lose not a precious moment of time in getting ready for the next publication. This characteristic finally made Theodore Roosevelt a voluminous writer on natural history in the last two decades of his life. During his ranching experience he was constantly observing the western game mammals and he made extensive contributions to our knowledge of their habits and distribution. Birds were his first love, and by far the most thorough knowledge which he displayed was in the field of ornithology; he knew not only the birds and their songs but also all their scientific names. Lord Grey, in an address to the Harvard students, verified this statement of Roosevelt’s unusual knowledge of birds, British as well as American. Walking through the New Forest together they observed upward of thirty species of birds, each of which Theodore Roosevelt knew by familiar and scientific name, recognizing many of them by what he had read of their songs.

Among extinct animals, in which I am especially interested, Roosevelt was not an original observer, but he was a voracious reader of everything worth while written about them and soon became extremely well informed. In this connection I recall an amusing and characteristic incident. Receiving an invitation to deliver one of the Romanes Lectures at Oxford—perhaps the greatest lectureship of the kind in the world—Roosevelt wrote to me, as follows, for advice as to whether he could do it and should do it:

I have just received from Lord Curzon, the Chancellor of Oxford, a
request to deliver the Romanes Lecture at any time I see fit. I shall
probably accept for the spring that I get out of Africa on my way back
to the United States. It seems to me worth while for me to do so.
Doesn’t it seem so to you? It is a lecture which has been delivered by
Gladstone, Huxley, John Morley, Bryce, and other men of that stamp.

I replied in the affirmative on both questions and he immediately wrote back that he would prepare the lecture on condition that I would read it over and make corrections, since it was my peculiar field of work. At that time he was President of the United States, nearing the end of his term and engaged in a tremendous struggle with both the Senate and the House, on which for the time he had apparently lost his hold. This political preoccupation, however, did not prevent his preparing three very important addresses which he had been asked to deliver, in Berlin, in Paris, and that above mentioned in Oxford.