Perhaps I read this book for the wrong reason. I've been reading my way through Steven Jay Gould's essay collections, and recently started on Fortey as well. Both are keenly interested in science not only for its own sake, but also as a human activity, both influenced by and influencing the society and culture of the moment. I don't always agree with their conclusions (particularly Gould's), but I always learn something, both about science and about its practitioners.
After many references to Cope and Marsh, it became obvious to me that there was a story here worthy of checking out for its own sake: arguably the two greatest palentologists of their age, locked in a decades-long feud. This book got good reviews, so I gave it a shot.
I did learn a lot more than I had known about Cope and Marsh, but frankly didn't learn a thing that I was interested in. Wallace's emphasis here is simply the feud itself, and even more particularly, a brief public battle that was waged between them for a couple of weeks in the pages of one of the day's scandal-prone newspapers. Wallace devotes 4 of the book's 20 chapters to this episode, as well devoting the book's prologue to the editor of the paper in question.
On the other hand, he devotes virtually no space to their actual professional lives, their publications, their theories, and the significance of their work. He's quite interested in Cope's futile struggles with Congress at one point, and in how the newspaper battle ultimately led to the decline in fortunes of John Wesley Powell. In another section he includes a line drawing of Marsh's reconstruction of a Brontosaurus, which more recently turned out to be an Apatasaurus with the wrong head, but doesn't show what the corrected skeleton should have looked like.
A final point which continued to irritate me was Wallace's use of the principals' first names throughout the book. Their full names were Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, and in my admittedly limited experience are usually referred to by their initials, E. D. Cope and O. C. March. Othniel, in particular, is hardly a common name. Although more frequently using their last names, as is customary, perhaps 10-20% of the time Wallace refers to them as Edward and Othniel. This implies a degree of familiarity and/or superiority on the part of the author which is altogether unwarranted, and set my teeth on edge every time.
In sum, Cope and Marsh clearly weren't saints, and clearly were products of their time, but they were perhaps the most highly respected American paleontologists of the 19th Century, and this book gives little indication of why.
