John Woodward (naturalist)

John Woodward (1665 to 1728) was an English naturalist, antiquarian and geologist, and the founder by bequest of the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology at the University of Cambridge. Born in Derbyshire, he was apprenticed to a linen draper in London at sixteen but went on to study medicine with Dr Peter Barwick. He became Gresham Professor of Physic in 1692, a fellow of the Royal Society in 1693 and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1702, and he stood on the modern side of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In 1699 he published water-culture experiments with spearmint, finding that plants grew better in less pure water than in distilled water. His fossil collection, begun in Gloucestershire, led to An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth of 1695, in which he argued that the earth's surface is divided into strata and that the enclosed fossils were generated at sea. Few of his theories survived, though he was a leading supporter of observation and experiment. He died at Gresham College and was buried in Westminster Abbey.