The American Naturalist Volume 31 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... Vol. XXXI. October, 1897. 370 EDWARD DRINKER COPE, NATURALIST--A CHAP-TER IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE.1 By Theodore Gill. I. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion, dear, Compels me to disturb your season due; For Lyeidas is dead, dead ere his time, Our Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. On the morning of the 13th of April, in a car on my way from a funeral in New York to Washington, a newspaper notice of the death, the day before, of my old friend, E. D. Cope, caught my eye. Shocked by the intelligence, I dropped the paper, and memory recalled various incidents of our long acquaintance. The threnody of Milton2 in commemoration of his friend Edward King, also rose to recollection, and the lines just quoted seemed to me to be peculiarly fitted for the great man just dead. He was, indeed, no longer young and had attained his prime,3 but he had planned work for many years to come, 1 Address by the retiring President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the Detroit Meeting, August 9th. Also printed in "Science," August 13, 1897, and in the "Scientific American Supplement," Aug. 14, 28, Sept. 4, 11,1897. 'Milton, Poems, XVII. 1 In the extract from Milton's poem, time has been substituted for prime, and our for young. and had well advanced in the execution of some of it. He had truly died before his time and had left no peer; the greatest of the long line of American naturalists was prematurely snatched from science and from friends. My acquaintance with Cope began in 1859. While looking through the part of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia for the month of April, in which my first paper published by the Academy had appeared, I found one by E. D. Cope "On the Primary Divisions of the...