Part 12

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, 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.