The Plinian Society was a club at the University of Edinburgh for students interested in natural history. It was founded in 1823. [1] Several of its members went on to have prominent careers, most notably Charles Darwin who announced his first scientific discoveries at the society. [2]
The society was initiated and promoted by three brothers from Berwickshire. John Baird, the oldest brother, was the first president of the society and at the inaugural meeting on 14 January 1823 he made a statement of the proposed plan and objectives of the society. He drew up an elaborate code of laws for the society, in eighteen chapters. The original members included James Hardie and J. Grant Malcomson, who later became geologists in India, and John Coldstream. [3] The Regius Professor of Natural History, Robert Jameson, had previously established the Wernerian Natural History Society for graduates and professors. He was given the title of Senior Honorary Member by the students, but never attended the Plinian and was not its founder. [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." Activities also included excursions to the countryside around Edinburgh. Meetings appear to have been weekly, until at the society's request, Jameson put their case to the university for a room in his museum for their meetings and their own small "museum", but the outcome was that the rent on their old room was raised and they eventually agreed to rent the Speculative Society's room for meetings on alternate Tuesdays. [1] [3] Papers presented by the students were often of high quality, inspired by their lecturers. Commonly, papers took the form of a critique of the work of established experts, together with the student's own thoughts. 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. [4]
Meetings included a great deal of procedure, with votes on motions and resolutions, and an annual reassessment of the elaborate rules. At that time each meeting was attended by around 25 members, including the five joint presidents, secretary, treasurer, "museum curator" and five members of the council. Around 150 past and present members were on the books. Most were medical undergraduates, with three or four who had graduated being referred to as "Dr" in the minutes. Several were legal students or humanities students, and a fair number of students from England reflected the numbers of nonconformists who were barred from attending the universities in England which required Anglicanism, and instead went to university in Scotland. Professors did not attend, and a December 1826 visit by Andrew Duncan secundus who intended to donate his latest publication as a reference book was greeted with indignation and a sarcastic student newspaper report that "This is the first time, says our correspondent, we remember to have seen one of our Professors in the Plinian Society." [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. Hooker, 10th February 1845.
"One day, when we were walking together, [Grant] 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 Edmond Grant had graduated in 1814, and then studied anatomy with Georges Cuvier and embryology with Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in Paris. 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. [1]
William A. F. Browne - an atheistic phrenologist - was proposed for membership by John Coldstream despite Coldstream's religious inclinations. Coldstream later made a considerable contribution to the psychiatry of learning disability. 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. [5] Browne also presented papers on various subjects, including plants he had collected, the habits of the cuckoo, the aurora borealis, and ghosts (which he believed in). [1] 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, [5] 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 Philosophy 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." Greg would later become a noted writer on Victorian social problems, including prostitution, and on female sexual desire. 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. [6] 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. [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. He was disappointed when Grant announced these finds to the Wernerian on 24 March 1827, [7] and Darwin presented both discoveries at the Plinian Society on 27 March, his first public presentation. [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. A furious debate ensued, and subsequently someone took the extraordinary step of deleting the minutes of this heretical part of the discussion. [9]
John Hutton Balfour joined the Plinian in 1827 and Hugh Falconer in 1828. Balfour took up the Chair of Botany at Edinburgh in 1845 and was, for many years, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine; his sister, Magdalene Balfour, married William A.F. Browne and bore him eight children, including James Crichton-Browne. The Baird brothers made occasional appearances after graduation, then in the 1829–1830 session they returned to Berwickshire, with two of them becoming ministers of local parishes. [3] The society collapsed in 1841. [10]
Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He is known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
William Rathbone Greg was an English essayist.
Professor Robert Jameson FRS FRSE was a Scottish naturalist and mineralogist.
Sir Charles Bell was a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, physiologist, neurologist, artist, and philosophical theologian. He is noted for discovering the difference between sensory nerves and motor nerves in the spinal cord. He is also noted for describing Bell's palsy.
Robert Edmond Grant MD FRCPEd FRS FRSE FZS FGS was a British anatomist and zoologist.
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John Hutton Balfour was a Scottish botanist. Balfour became a Professor of Botany, first at the University of Glasgow in 1841, moving to the University of Edinburgh and also becoming the 7th Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Her Majesty's Botanist in 1845. He held these posts until his retirement in 1879. He was nicknamed Woody Fibre.
Transmutation of species and transformism are 19th-century evolutionary ideas for the altering of one species into another that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. The French Transformisme was a term used by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 for his theory, and other 19th century proponents of pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas included Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Robert Grant, and Robert Chambers, the anonymous author of the book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Opposition in the scientific community to these early theories of evolution, led by influential scientists like the anatomists Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen and the geologist Charles Lyell, was intense. The debate over them was an important stage in the history of evolutionary thought and would influence the subsequent reaction to Darwin's theory.
The inception of Darwin's theory occurred during an intensively busy period which began when Charles Darwin returned from the survey voyage of the Beagle, with his reputation as a fossil collector and geologist already established. He was given an allowance from his father to become a gentleman naturalist rather than a clergyman, and his first tasks were to find suitable experts to describe his collections, write out his Journal and Remarks, and present papers on his findings to the Geological Society of London.
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Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. His proposition that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors is now widely accepted, and considered a foundational concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and he was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey.
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"Browne was one of the reformers of the asylum care of the insane whose improvements and innovations were chronicled in his annual reports from The Crichton Royal Institution, but who in addition published almost on the threshold of his career a sort of manifesto of what he wished to see accomplished...." Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (1963) Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860, page 865.
Lansdown Guilding was a theologian and naturalist. He is best known for his works on the flora and fauna of St Vincent in particular and on the Caribbean in general. He wrote numerous illustrated papers for journals of scholarly societies in England including the first descriptions of velvet worms and scale insects in the ground pearl family.
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