Part 23

To Professor Marsh should be given credit for the first organized expedition designed exclusively for the collection of vertebrate remains, the results of which contain so much material that it has not yet entirely seen the light of scientific exposition. Marsh’s first trip to the West was in 1868, the first formal expedition being organized two years later. These expeditions, of which there were four, were privately financed except for the material and military escort furnished by the United States Government, and consisted of a personnel drawn entirely from the graduate or undergraduate body of Yale University. These parties explored Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Oregon, and returned laden with material from the Cretaceous and Tertiary formations of the West. Some of this is of necessity somewhat fragmentary, but type after type was secured which, with his exhaustive knowledge of comparative anatomy, enabled Marsh to announce discovery after discovery of species, genera, families, and even orders of mammals, birds, and reptiles which were unknown to science. The year 1873 saw the last of the student expeditions, and thereafter until the close of his life the work of collecting was done under Marsh’s supervision, but by paid explorers, many of whom had been his scouts and guides in the formal expeditions or had been especially trained by him in the East. In 1882, after fourteen years of the experience thus gained, Marsh was appointed vertebrate paleontologist to the United States Geological Survey, which relieved him in part of the personal expense connected with the collecting, although up to within a short time of his death his own fortune was very largely spent in enlarging his collections. After his connection with the Survey was established, Marsh had two main purposes in view in making the collections: (1) to determine the geological horizon of each locality where a large series of vertebrate fossils was found, and (2) to secure from these localities large collections of the more important forms sufficiently extensive to reveal, if possible, the life histories of each. Marsh believed that the material thus secured would serve as key or diagnostic fossils to all horizons of our western geology above the Paleozoic, a belief in which he was in advance of his time, for few of his contemporaries appreciated the value of vertebrates as horizon markers. The result of the fulfilment of his second purpose saw the accumulation of huge collections from all horizons above the Triassic and some Paleozoic and Triassic as well. These contained some very remarkable series, each of which Marsh hoped to make the basis of an elaborate monograph to be published under the auspices of the Survey. One can visualize the scope of his ambitions by the fact that no fewer than twenty-seven projected quarto volumes, to contain at least 850 lithographic plates, were listed by him in 1877. These covered, among other groups, the toothed birds (Odontornithes), Dinocerata, horses, brontotheres, pterodactyls, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, monkeys, carnivores, perissodactyls and artiodactyls, crocodiles, lizards, dinosaurs, various birds, proboscideans, edentates and marsupials, brain evolution, and the Connecticut Valley footprints. Much was done towards the preparation of these memoirs, as evidenced by the long list of preliminary papers, admirably illustrated by woodcuts which were to form the text figures of the memoirs, which appeared with great regularity in the pages of the Journal for a period of thirty years. Of the actual memoirs, however, but two had been published at the time of Marsh’s death in 1899—the Odontornithes in 1880 and the Dinocerata in 1884. One must not overlook, however, the epoch-making Dinosaurs of North America, which was published by the Survey in 1896, although it was not in the form nor had it the scope of the proposed monographs. This was not due to lack of application, for Professor Marsh was an indefatigable worker, but rather to the fact that the program was of such magnitude as to necessitate a patriarchal life span for its consummation. As it is, Professor Marsh’s fame rests first upon his ability and intrepidity as a collector, ready himself to brave the very certain hardships and dangers which beset the field paleontologist in the pioneer days, and also by his judgment and command of men to secure the very adequate services of others and so to direct their endeavors that the results were of the highest value. The material witness to Marsh’s skill as a collector lies in the collections of the Peabody Museum at Yale and in the Marsh collection at the United States National Museum, the latter secured through the funds of the United States Geological Survey. Together they constitute what is possibly the greatest collection of fossil vertebrates in America, if not in the world; individually, they are second only to that of the American Museum in New York City, the result of the combined labors of Osborn and Cope and their very able corps of assistants.

As a scientist Marsh possessed in large measure that wide knowledge of comparative anatomy so necessary to the vertebrate paleontologist, and as a consequence was not only able to recognize affinities and classify unerringly, but also to recognize the salient diagnostic features of the form before him and in few words so to describe them as to render the recognition of the species by another worker relatively easy. The publication of hundreds of these specific diagnoses in the Journal constitutes a very large and valuable part of that periodical’s contribution to the advancement of our science. Marsh’s method of indicating forms by so brief a statement leaves much to be done, however, in the way of further description of his types, which in many instances were but partially prepared.

Yet another important service which Marsh rendered to science was the restoration of the creatures as a whole, made with the most painstaking care and precision through assembling the drawings of the individual bones. These restorations have become classic, embracing as they did a score or more of forms, of beast, bird, and reptile. They also were published first in the Journal, although they have subsequently been reproduced in text-books and other works the world over. Part of Marsh’s popular reputation, at least, which was second to that of no other American in his line, was due to his skill in attaining publicity, for his papers, of whatever extent, were carefully and methodically sent to correspondents in the uttermost parts of the earth, and thus the Marsh collection has reflected the fame of its maker.

_Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897)._

The third great name in American vertebrate paleontology, that of Edward Drinker Cope, stands out in sharp contrast with the other two, although in the range of his interests he was probably more nearly comparable with Leidy than with Marsh. The beginning of Cope’s scientific labors dates from 1859, the year made famous in the annals of science by the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species. It is not surprising, therefore, that matters evolutional should have interested him to the very end of his career. Cope was not merely a paleontologist, but was interested in recent forms, especially the three lower classes of vertebrates, to such an extent that his work therewith is highly authoritative and in some respects epoch-making. Thirty-eight years of almost continual toil were his, and the mere mass of his literary productions is prodigious, especially when one realizes that, unlike those of a writer of fiction, they were based on painstaking research and philosophical thought. The greater part of Cope’s life was spent in or near Philadelphia except for his western explorations, and he is best known as professor of geology and paleontology in the University of Pennsylvania, although he served other institutions as well.

Cope’s early work was among the amphibia and reptiles, his first paleontological paper, the description of _Amphibamus grandiceps_, appearing in 1865. This year he also began his studies of the mammals, especially the Cetacea, both living and extinct, from the Atlantic seaboard. The next year saw the beginning of his work on the material from the Cretaceous marls of New Jersey, describing therefrom one of the first carnivorous dinosaurs, _Lælaps_, to be discovered in America. In 1868 Cope began to describe the vertebrates from the Kansas chalk and three years later made his first exploration of these beds. This led to his connection with the United States Geological Survey of the Territories under Hayden, and to continued exploration of Wyoming and Colorado in 1872 and 1873. The material thus gained, consisting of fishes, mosasaurs, dinosaurs, and other reptiles, was described in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society as well as in the Survey Bulletins. In 1875 these results were summarized in a large quarto volume entitled “Vertebrata of the Cretaceous formations of the West.” Subsequent summers were spent in further exploration of the Bridger, Washakie, and Wasatch formations of Wyoming, the Puerco and Torrejon of New Mexico, and the Judith River of Montana. The material gathered in New Mexico proved particularly valuable, and led to the publication in 1877 of another notable volume entitled “Report upon the Extinct Vertebrata obtained in New Mexico by Parties of the Expedition of 1874.”

Material was now accumulating so fast as to necessitate the concentration of Cope’s own time on research, so that, while he continued to make brief journeys to the West, the real work of exploration was delegated to Charles H. Sternberg and J. L. Wortman, both of whom became subsequently very well known, the former as a collector whose active service has not yet ceased, the latter as an explorer and later an investigator of extremely high promise.

As early as 1865, Cope began no fewer than five separate lines of research which he pursued concurrently for the remainder of his career. On the fishes, he became a high authority in the larger classification, owing to his researches into their phylogeny, for which a knowledge of extinct forms is imperative. On amphibia, he wrote more voluminously than any other naturalist, discussing not only the morphology but the paleontology and taxonomy as well. In this connection must be mentioned not only Cope’s exploration and collections in the Permian of Ohio and Illinois, but especially the remains from the Texas Permian, first received in 1877, upon which some of his most brilliant results were based; these of course included reptilian as well as amphibian material. His third line of research, the Reptilia, is in part included in the foregoing, but also embraced the reptiles of the Bridger and other Tertiary deposits, those of the Kansas Cretaceous, and the Cretaceous dinosaurs.

Up to 1868 Leidy alone was engaged in research in the West, but that year saw the simultaneous entrance of Marsh and Cope into this new field of research, and their exploration and descriptions of similar regions and forms soon led to a rivalry which in turn developed into a most unfortunate series of controversies, mainly over the subject of priority. This resulted in a permanent rupture of friendship and the division of American workers into two opposing camps to the detriment of the progress of our science. This breach has now been happily healed, and for a number of years the degree of mutual good will and aid on the part of our workers has been of the highest sort.

The extent of the western fossil area, and particularly the explorations of three of Cope’s aids, Wortman in the Big Horn and Wasatch basins, Baldwin in the Puerco of New Mexico, and Cummins in the Permian of Texas, gave him so fruitful a field of endeavor that the occasion for jealous rivalry was largely removed. The most manifest result of Cope’s western work was the publication in 1883 of his Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West, which formed volume =3= of the quarto publications of the Hayden Survey. This huge book contains more than 1000 pages and 80 plates and has been facetiously called “Cope’s Bible.”

Cope’s philosophical contributions, which covered the domains of evolution, psychology, ethics, and metaphysics, began in 1868 with his paper on The Origin of Genera. In evolution he was a follower of Lamarck, and as such, with Hyatt, Ryder, and Packard, was one of the founders of the so-called Neo-Lamarckian School in America. Cope’s principal contribution, set forth in his Factors of Organic Evolution, is the idea of kinetogenesis or mechanical genesis, the principle that all structures are the direct outcome of the stresses and strains to which the organism is subjected. Weismann’s forcible attack on the transmission theory did not shake Cope’s faith in these doctrines, for he claimed that the paleontological evidence for the inheritance of such characters as are apparently the result of _individual_ modification was too strong to be refuted. Cope was more like Lamarck than any other naturalist in his mental make-up as well as his ideas. He was also, like Haeckel, given to working out the phylogeny of whatever type lay before him, and in many instances arrived marvellously near the truth as we now see it.

Associated for a while with A. S. Packard, Cope soon became chief editor and proprietor of the American Naturalist, which was for many years his main means of publication and thus served our science in a way comparable to the Journal. As Osborn says by way of summation:

“Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist in Paleontology. After Huxley he was the last representative of the old broad-gauge school of anatomists and is only to be compared with members of that school. His life work bears marks of great genius, of solid and accurate observation, and at times of inaccuracy due to bad logic or haste and overpressure of work.... As a comparative anatomist he ranks both in the range and effectiveness of his knowledge and his ideas with Cuvier and Owen.... As a natural philosopher, while far less logical than Huxley, he was more creative and constructive, his metaphysics ending in theism rather than agnosticism.”

_1870–1880._

The seventh decade was productive of comparatively few great names in the history of our science, but two, J. A. Ryder and Samuel W. Williston, being notable contributors. The former produced but few papers and those between 1877 and 1892, yet they were of note and such was their influence that he is named with Hyatt, Packard, and Cope as one of the founders of the Neo-Lamarckian School of evolutionists in America. Ryder was a particular friend and a colleague of Cope, as they were both concerned with the back-boned animals, while the other two were invertebratists. Ryder wrote on mechanical genesis of tooth forms and on scales of fishes, also on the morphology and evolution of the tails of fishes, cetaceans, and sirenians, and of the other fins of aquatic types. He did, on the other hand, practically no systematic or descriptive work.

Williston, on the contrary, has had a long and varied career as an investigator and as an educator. Trained at Yale, he prepared for medicine, and much of his teaching has been of human anatomy, both at Yale and at the University of Kansas where he served for a number of years as dean of the Medical School. He is also a student of flies, and as such not only the foremost but indeed almost the only dipterologist in the United States. But it is with his work as a vertebrate paleontologist that we are chiefly concerned, and here again he stands among the foremost. His initial work and training in this department of science were with Marsh, for whom he spent many months in field work, collecting largely in the Niobrara Cretaceous of Kansas. He did, however, no research while with Marsh, owing to the latter’s disinclination to foster such work on the part of his associates. Williston began his publications in 1878 and has continued them until the present, working mainly with Cretaceous mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterodactyls. Of late, since his transference to the University of Chicago, where as professor of paleontology and director of the Walker Museum he has served since 1902, his interest has lain mainly among the Paleozoic reptiles and amphibia. Williston’s more notable works are American Permian Vertebrates and Water Reptiles of the Past and Present, wherein he sets forth his views of the phylogenesis and taxonomy of the reptilian class. He is at present at work on the evolution of the reptiles, a volume which is eagerly awaited by his colleagues. It is in morphology that Williston’s greatest strength lies and some of his most effective work on the mosasaurs has appeared in the Journal.

_1880–1900._

The next decade, that of 1880–1890, saw a number of notable additions to the workers in vertebrate paleontology: Henry F. Osborn, W. B. Scott, R. W. Shufeldt, J. L. Wortman, George Baur, F. A. Lucas, and F. W. True. Shufeldt is our highest authority on the osteology of birds, both recent and extinct, having recently described all of the extinct forms contained in the Marsh collection; True wrote of Cetacea; Lucas of marine and Pleistocene mammals and birds, and has also written popular books on prehistoric life. Lucas’s greatest service, however, lies in the museums, where he has manifested a genius second to none in the installation of mute evidences of living and past organisms. Wortman was for a time associated with Cope, later with Osborn in the American Museum, again at the Carnegie Museum at Pittsburgh, and finally at Yale in research on the Bridger Eocene portion of the Marsh collection. His work has been chiefly the perfection of field methods in vertebrate paleontology, and as a special investigator of Tertiary Mammalia, treating the latter largely from the morphologic and taxonomic standpoints. Wortman’s Yale results on the carnivores and primates of the Eocene, as yet unfinished, were published in the Journal in 1901–1904.

William B. Scott is a graduate of Princeton, and has spent thirty-four years in her service as Blair Professor of Geology and Paleontology. His first publication, in 1878, issued in conjunction with Osborn and Speir, described material collected by them in the Eocene formations of the West, and since that time Scott’s research has been entirely with the mammals, on which he is one of our highest authorities. His most notable works have been a History of Land Mammals of the Western Hemisphere, 1913, and the results of the Patagonian expeditions by Hatcher, which are published in a quarto series in conjunction with W. J. Sinclair, although they are the authors of separate volumes, Scott’s work being mainly on the carnivores and edentates of the Santa Cruz formation. It is as a systematist in research and as an educator that Scott has attained his highest usefulness.

The man who, next to the three pioneers, has attained the highest reputation in vertebrate paleontologic research, is Henry Fairfield Osborn. Graduate of Princeton in the same class that produced Scott, Osborn served for a time as professor of comparative anatomy in that institution, and in 1891 was called to New York to organize the department of zoology in Columbia University and that of vertebrate paleontology in the American Museum of Natural History. He had, early in his career, gone west in company with Professor Scott, and had collected material from the Eocene formation of Wyoming, upon which they based their first joint paper in 1878, Osborn’s first independent production, a memoir on two genera of Dinocerata, appearing in 1881. A number of papers followed, on the Mesozoic Mammalia, on Cope’s tritubercular theory, and on certain apparent evidences for the transmission of acquired characters. It was, however, with his acceptance of the New York responsibilities, especially at the American Museum, that Osborn’s most significant work began. Aided first by Wortman and Earle, later by W. D. Matthew and others, he has built up the greatest and most complete collection of fossil vertebrates extant; its value, however, was largely enhanced through the purchase of the private collection of Professor Cope, which of course included a large number of types. The American Museum collection thus contains not only a vast series of representative specimens from every class and order of vertebrates, secured by purchase or expedition from nearly all the great localities of the world, but an exhibition series of skulls and partial and entire skeletons and restorations which no other institution can hope to equal. Based upon this wonderful material is a large amount of research, filling many volumes, published for the greater part in the bulletin and memoirs of the Museum. This research is not only the product of the staff, including Walter Granger, Barnum Brown, W. D. Matthew, and W. K. Gregory, but also of a number of other American and some foreign paleontologists as well.

Professor Osborn’s own work has been voluminous, his bibliography from 1877 to 1916 containing no fewer than 441 titles, ranging over the fields of paleontology,—which of course includes the greater number—geology, correlation and paleogeography, evolutionary principles exemplified in the Mammalia, man, neurology and embryology, biographies, and the theory of education.

In paleontology, Osborn’s researches have been largely with the Reptilia and Mammalia, partly morphological, but also taxonomic and evolutional. Faunistic studies have also been made of the mammals. Of his published volumes the most important are, first, the Age of Mammals (1910), in which he treats not of evolutionary series of phylogenies, but of faunas and their origin, migrations, and extinctions, and of the correlation of Old and New World Tertiary deposits and their contents. Men of the Old Stone Age (1916) is an exhaustive treatise and is the first full and authoritative American presentation of what has been discovered up to the present time throughout the world in regard to human prehistory. In his latest volume, The Origin and Evolution of Life (1917), Osborn presents a new energy conception of evolution and heredity as against the prevailing matter and form conceptions. In this volume there is summed up the whole story of the origin and evolution of life on earth up to the appearance of man. This last book is novel in its conceptions, but it is too early as yet to judge of the acceptance of Osborn’s theses by his fellow workers in science.

Since the death of Professor Marsh, Osborn has served as vertebrate paleontologist to the United States Geological Survey, and has in charge the carrying through to completion of the many monographs proposed by his distinguished predecessor. One of these, that on the horned dinosaurs, has been completed by Hatcher and Lull (1907), another on the stegosaurian dinosaurs has been carried forward by C. W. Gilmore of the United States National Museum, while under Osborn’s own hand are the memoirs on the titanotheres (aided by W. K. Gregory), the horses, and the sauropod dinosaurs. Of these, the first, when it shall have been completed, promises to be the most monumental and exhaustive study of a group of fossil organisms ever undertaken.

As a leader in science, a teacher and administrator, Professor Osborn’s rank is high among the leading vertebratists. He is remarkably successful in his choice of assistants and in stimulating them in their productiveness so that their combined results form a very considerable share of the later literature in America.