Plinian Society

[1] From Darwin's description, the Plinian "consisted of students and met in an underground room in the university for the sake of reading papers on natural science and discussing them."

They covered a wide range of subjects including the circulation of ocean currents, identification of plants found in the nearby countryside, the anatomy of sea animals they had collected and principles of classification.

"[1] " I forget whether you attended Edinburgh [University] 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.

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 Edmond Grant had graduated in 1814, and then studied anatomy with Georges Cuvier and embryology with Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in Paris.

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.

Browne was a proponent of Lamarckian "developmental" theories of the mind and at the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, George Combe toasted him for his success in proselytising other medical students.

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."

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.

[2] Darwin made a discovery new to science when he observed cilia moving the microscopic larvae of a species of the bryozoan Flustra, and discovered that black spores often found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech.

[8] 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.