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Is he in the position of a scientific Tantalus doomed always to thirst for a knowledge which he cannot obtain? The reverse is to be hoped; nay, it may not be impossible to indicate the source whence help will come. In commencing these remarks, mention was made of the great obligations under which the naturalist lies to the geologist and paleontologist.
Indeed, the mass of biological facts has been so greatly increased, and the range of biological speculation has been so vastly widened, by the researches of the geologist and paleontologist, that it is to be feared there are naturalists in existence who look upon geology as Brindley regarded rivers.
Is he in the position of a scientific Tantalus doomed always to thirst for a knowledge which he cannot obtain? The reverse is to be hoped; nay, it may not be impossible to indicate the source whence help will come. In commencing these remarks, mention was made of the great obligations under which the naturalist lies to the geologist and paleontologist.
At last, in 1854, on the translation of my warm friend Edward Forbes, to Edinburgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the Director-General of the Geological Survey, offered me the post Forbes vacated of Paleontologist and Lecturer on Natural History.
COPE, EDWARD DRINKER. Born at Philadelphia, July 28, 1840; professor of natural sciences, Haverford College, 1864-67; paleontologist to United States Geological Survey, 1868 to death at Philadelphia, April 12, 1897.
Yet it seems within the possibilities that the meteorologist may learn from the geologist of Central America something that will enable him to explain to the paleontologist of Europe how it chanced that at one time the mammoth and rhinoceros roamed across northern Siberia, while at another time the reindeer and musk-ox browsed along the shores of the Mediterranean.
He thought for a moment. "Know anything about geology?" "Why, some; I have to work with fossils. I'm as much a paleontologist as a zoologist. Why?" "How'd you like to stay here with me and hunt fossil jellyfish for a while? We won't make twice as much, together, as I'm making now, but you can look one way while I'm looking the other, and we may both stay alive longer that way."
On this side of the river, nearly opposite Mencius Temple, is a butte of singularly beautiful structure, of an elevation of four thousand seven hundred and thirty feet. This is named Marsh Butte, in honor of the great paleontologist, the rival of the equally great Cope.
In 1881 he asserted that the evidence gathered in the previous decade had been so unequivocal that, had the transmutation hypothesis not existed, "the paleontologist would have had to invent it." Since then the delvers after fossils have piled proof on proof in bewildering profusion. The fossil-beds in the "bad lands" of western America seem inexhaustible.
In the present condition of our knowledge and of our methods, one verdict "not proven, and not provable" must be recorded against all the grand hypotheses of the paleontologist respecting the general succession of life on the globe. The order and nature of terrestrial life, as a whole, are open questions.
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