 The Edinburgh comparative anatomist, Robert Edmond Grant (1793–1874), played an important role in introducing the French discussions into the British Isles. He would also serve as Charles Darwin’s first mentor in science when Darwin was a young medical student at the University of Edinburgh (1825–27). Grant was directly engaged with the issues being debated at the time between Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Cuvier and Lamarck, and he advocated a variant of a Lamarckian-Geoffroyean transformism in his writings, themes expounded in his lectures on comparative anatomy at the new University College, London where he became the first professor of comparative anatomy in 1827 (Desmond 1989).