Robert Edmund Grant

Robert Edmond Grant (1793-1874) was a professor at London University. He was a Lamarkian Evolutionist and a friend of Charles Darwin. Darwin and Grant met while Darwin was studying medicine at Edinburgh University in 1826-7. Grant, who had obtained his MD at Edinburgh in 1814, was a specialist in marine biology and invertebrate zoology, In particular he was an expert on the taxonomy and functioning of sponges. He and Darwin collected specimens together on the Firth of Forth. Grant was a materialist, probably a deist, and politically radical. His biology was equally subversive. He considered that the same laws of life affected all organisms, from monad to man. Indeed he followed the French zoologist Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire by suggesting that all life shared a 'unity of plan'. Following Lamarck, Grant arranged life into a chain, or an escalator, and this was kept moving upwards by the appearance of spontaneously emerging monads at its base. He is important, not only as Darwin's Lamarckian mentor, but for having introduced academic comparative anatomy into England, through his lectures at London University (where he taught from 1828-74).