Robert Edmond Grant
Robert Edmond Grant MD FRCPEd FRS FRSE FZS FGS (11 November 1793 – 23 August 1874) was a British anatomist and zoologist.
Having obtained his MD at Edinburgh in 1814, Grant gave up medical practice in favour of marine biology and the zoology of invertebrates, living on a legacy from his father.
As a materialist and freethinker, and politically radical, he was open to ideas in biology that were considered subversive in the climate of opinion prevailing in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars.
He cited Erasmus Darwin's Zoönomia in his doctoral dissertation, a work which introduced the idea of evolution in poetical form.
[2] He became one of the foremost naturalists of the early 19th century at Edinburgh and subsequently the first Professor of Comparative Anatomy at University College London.
He came into contact with the French zoologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire who promulgated a view on evolution similar to that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's.
Grant studied marine life around the Firth of Forth, collecting specimens around the shores near a house he took at Prestonpans as well as from fishing boats, and becoming an expert on the biology of sponges and sea-slugs.
Following Geoffroy, Grant arranged life into a chain, or an escalator, which was kept moving upwards by the appearance of spontaneously emerging monads at its base.
[4] Grant was a stalwart of the Plinian Society for student naturalists, which Charles Darwin joined in the autumn of 1826 on starting his second year of medical studies at Edinburgh University.
On 24 March 1827 Grant announced to the society that black spores often found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech, and published a paper on this discovery.
He was opposed by Tories who attacked him for supporting "the reptile press" and its "blasphemous derision of the truths of Christianity" and succeeded in getting him voted out of a post at the Zoological Society of London.
The Edinburgh extramural medical schools were fertile ground for Geoffroy's ideas, and Scottish radicals became Geoffroyan disciples.
[10] One of his major discoveries was the homology of the opercular plates of the gill cover of fishes with the inner ear ossicles of mammals.
The Geoffroy-Cuvier debate in Paris before the Académie des Sciences (15 February 1830) saw Georges Cuvier demolish his claim that the four Cuvierian branches of the animal kingdom could be reduced to one.
Also, Grant accepted a common origin for plants and animals, and the basic units of life ('monads'), he proposed, were spontaneously generated.
