xxxiv Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. 
had become vacant by the demission of Dr Henry Gray, who had 
gone out with the Free Church, and Dr Grant was offered by the 
Town Council the presentation. After full deliberation he accepted 
the translation, and the rest of his active ministerial life was passed 
in St Mary’s. At a later period of the same year he was offered by 
the Town Council a presentation to one of the charges of the High 
Church (St Giles), but he declined the offer. He was also then 
appointed Collector of the Widows’ h'und of the Ministers and 
Professors, an office which he held until 1860, and in which his 
remarkable talent for business found congenial scope. For ten years 
after his removal to Edinburgh he was much occupied in a contro- 
versy which, in its day, excited bitter feeling, but which is happily 
now nearly forgotten — viz., the Edinburgh Annuity Tax question, 
in regard to the manner in which funds for the payment of the 
stipends of the ministers of Edinburgh were raised. Dr Grant, as 
one of these ministers, was a prominent figure in the discussions, 
and ultimately when the controversy was settled by legislation on 
the footing of the payment of a capital sum by the Corporation of 
Edinburgh, the interest of which was to take the place of the old 
tax, and to be applied by a newly-constituted Ecclesiastical Com- 
mission, Dr Grant was at once elected a member of that Commission, 
and ultimately became its chairman. This was the period of his 
greatest activity, both in parochial work and in the Church Courts, 
and in 1851 he became Moderator of the General Assembly. The 
same year he received from Oxford at Commemoration the honorary 
degree of D.C.L., the only other recipient of that degree among the 
clergymen of the Church of Scotland having been Dr Chalmers. 
In 1860 he began to retire from active life outside his parochial 
work. His attendance in Church Courts almost ceased, and in that 
year he resigned the Collectorship of the Widows’ Fund. In 1871 
he resigned his parochial charge, and for the last nineteen years of 
his life he lived in retirement from active ministerial work, devot- 
ing himself much to the management of various religious, charitable, 
and educational institutions, in the governing bodies of which he 
held a seat. He was for more than fifty years an Honorary Fellow 
and Chaplain of the Harveian Society, and at the annual meetings 
of that body he came in contact with many of the most eminent 
medical men in Scotland, including many Fellows of this Society. 
