Part 13

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. 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.

In a relatively short time I received the manuscript of his Romanes Lecture. It was full of analogies between the extinct animal kingdom and the kingdoms and principalities of the human world, in which he compared one moribund government in Europe to the Megatherium and another that had ceased to progress about three centuries ago to the Glyptodon! I drew heavy blue pencil lines across these pages, with the word “omit” in the margin, and wrote: “I have left out certain passages that are likely to bring on war between the United States and the governments referred to.” It developed later that the expurgated passages were quite dear to the author, but in keeping with his character he thanked me warmly and assured me that

I have profited by your advice to at once change what I said about the Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, and I think I now have it so that no legitimate offense can be taken. But you rather frighten me by speaking of the importance which you say will be attached to my speech. I am speaking purely as a layman and as a private citizen, and when I accepted the invitation it never occurred to me that any more importance would be attached to what I said than, for instance, to what Curzon or Bryce said in their lectures.

Shortly afterward, at a White House luncheon, I was surprised when President Roosevelt informed the entire table that I had been reviewing his Romanes Lecture and softening some of his favorite war-provoking passages. I had already read the manuscript twice, but I told him I would be glad to look it over again. I shall never forget his reply; with a broad sweep of his hand, ending with his fist on the luncheon table, he said: