Plinian Society - Grant, Browne and Darwin

Grant, Browne and Darwin

" I forget whether you attended Edinburgh as a student, but in my time, there was a knot of men who were far from being the indifferent and dull listeners which you expect..." Charles Darwin to J.D. Hooker, 10th February 1845.

"One day, when we were walking together, burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution. I listened in silent astonishment, and as far as I can judge, without any effect on my mind. I had previously read the Zoonomia of my grandfather, in which similar views are maintained...." Charles Darwin (1876) Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character.

Dr. Robert Edmund Grant had graduated in 1814 and travelled to study anatomy with Georges Cuvier, and embryology with Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. On returning in 1824 he was appointed lecturer in invertebrate animals at the private anatomy school set up by John Barclay and run by Robert Knox from 1826. His lectures there promoted Geoffroy's "philosophical anatomy" based on unity of plan compatible with the transmutation of species, implying ideas of progressive improvement and hence radical support for democracy. He was secretary of the Plinian, then in 1826 gave up that post to join the Council of the Wernerian Natural History Society. Plinian members helped with his pioneering work on marine invertebrates from the Firth of Forth, with Coldstream assisting him in 1825–1826.

William A. F. Browne was proposed for membership by John Coldstream despite Coldstream's religious inclinations. Browne was an atheistic phrenologist and a proponent of Lamarckian "developmental" theories of the mind. At the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, George Combe toasted Browne for his success in proselytising other medical students. Browne also presented papers on diverse subjects, including plants he had collected, the habits of the cuckoo, the aurora borealis, and ghosts (which he believed in). Browne went on to a distinguished career as an asylum reformer at Sunnyside Royal Hospital in Montrose (1834–1838), and, famously, at the Crichton Royal, Dumfries (1838–1857); his son, James Crichton-Browne, collaborated with Darwin in the preparation of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).

In the second year of Charles Darwin's education at Edinburgh he took an increased interest in natural history. Browne, Coldstream and George Fife as three of the five joint presidents proposed Darwin for membership, and he petitioned to join the Plinian on 21 November 1826, at a meeting when Browne announced his intention to refute Charles Bell's Anatomy and Physiology of Expression. Darwin was elected a member of the Plinian on 28 November 1826, along with another student of his own age, William Rathbone Greg, who immediately announced plans for a talk showing that "the lower animals possess every faculty & propensity of the human mind." On 5 December Darwin was elected to the society's council. At the same meeting Browne presented an attack on Bell's claims that the Creator had endowed humans with unique muscles lacking in animals to express emotions showing mankind's superior moral nature, and denied that there was any essential difference. Darwin went on to attend eighteen of nineteen meetings that he could have attended during that academic year, and became a zealous assistant to Grant, learning to collect and dissect seashore creatures.

Darwin made a discovery new to science when he observed cilia moving the microscopic larvae of a species of the bryzoan Flustra, and discovered that black spores often found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech. He was disappointed when Grant announced these finds to the Wernerian on 24 March 1827, and Darwin presented both discoveries at the Plinian Society on 27 March, his first public presentation. Grant then gave an authoritative talk on sea-mats, followed by Browne who argued that mind and consciousness were simply aspects of brain activity, rather than evidence of "souls" or spiritual entities separate from the body. A furious debate ensued, and subsequently someone took the extraordinary step of deleting the minutes of this heretical part of the discussion.

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