Robert Morison

Robert Morison (1620 to 1683) was a Scottish botanist and taxonomist, a forerunner of John Ray, who elucidated and developed the first systematic classification of plants. Born in Aberdeen, he took his Master of Arts at the University of Aberdeen at eighteen, fought on the Royalist side in the English Civil War and was badly wounded at the Battle of the Bridge of Dee in 1639, then fled to France. In 1648 he took a doctorate in medicine at the University of Angers and devoted himself wholly to botany, studying in Paris under Vespasien Robin and becoming director of the Royal Gardens at Blois for ten years. In 1660 he returned to England as physician to Charles II and superintendent of the royal gardens, and in 1669 he became the first professor of botany at Oxford. That year he published Praeludia Botanica, which stressed classifying plants by the structure of their fruits, and his criticism of the systems of Jean and Gaspard Bauhin caused some anger among his colleagues.