Abstract

Wakley in 1846 called Grant “at once the most eloquent, the most accomplished, the most self-sacrificing, and the most unrewarded man in the profession.”128 I have shown some of the reasons why this was so, and I have suggested that his Lamarckism was one of a number of factors that served to alienate him from the conservative scientific community in the 1830's and 1840's. I have further shown the need for a fundamental rethinking of Grant's position in the history of biology. There is little profit in seeing him as a precursor of Darwin. His importance lies as a teacher of philosophical anatomy and as the disseminator of Geoffroy's views in London. With the recent interest of historians in the emergence of a non-Paleyite approach to design in the 1830's (that is, an approach stemming from a unity of plan), a reassessment of Grant along these lines seems in order.Also, by understanding Grant's professional and transmutational threat, we can more fully appreciate the anti-Lamarckian ploys of leading scientists like Owen and Lyell. These scientific and social tactics reinforced the isolation Grant suffered as a result of his radical, materialistic, and antimonopolist views. Together with the laissez-faire arrangements at the joint-stock university, they led to his financial collapse — and to the decline of his scientific output that Darwin found so inexplicable. Beddoe described Grant as a disappointed man. “Alas!” wrote Wakley. “Who would be an English Cuvier?”129