Robert Morison (1620-1683)

Portrait of Robert Morison
The Scotsman Robert Morison (1620-1683) was appointed as the first Professor of Botany in a British university in 1669. His major research project, the Plantarum historiaes universalis Oxoniensis (Historia), was a new classification of the world’s plants based on fruit characteristics. Originally planned in three volumes, only the second was published before Morison’s death in 1683. The third and final volume was completed posthumously in 1699 by Jacob Bobart the Younger (1641-1719), second Keeper of the Oxford Physic Garden while the first volume remained unpublished.

Interest in the creation of classificatory systems for the natural world was rampant throughout the seventeenth and early-eighteenth century. Individual endeavors in this project resulted in hundreds, likely even thousands of lists of cultivated plants stored in herbaria, herbals, or gardens across Europe. To coalesce this information into a single classification system, Morison relied on the contributions of patrons and collectors across Europe including Hans Sloane, Henry Compton the Bishop of London, and others.

One of these chief contributors was Jacob Bobart the Younger, keeper of the Oxford Physick Garden. Although not officially affiliated with a university position, Bobart was widely travelled and respected across Europe, and a renowned horticulturalist. Upon Morison’s death, Bobart took over the professor’s teaching and academic duties and completed Part 3 of the Historia just months before his own death.

The surviving materials of this project, held in the Oxford University Herbaria, proved an extraordinarily rich source for understanding the production process of a major scientific publication in the seventeenth century, from inspiration in the natural world to distribution among Europe’s intellectual elite.

Image details: Robert White, after William Sunman (Sonmans). Description: line engraving, 1680, published 1683 or after; 13 7/8 in. x 9 in. (354 mm x 230 mm) paper size. Source: Wellcome Collection, no. 7048i. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

Literature: Scott Mandelbrote in ODNB; idem, 'Robert Morison’s Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis, in The History of Oxford University Press. Volume I: Beginnings to 1780, ed. Ian Gadd (Oxford, 2013), online; idem, 'The Publication and Illustration of Robert Morison's Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis', Huntington Library Quarterly, 78.2 (2015), 349-379.

Sources: a digital copy of Morison’s Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1699), part 3 is available from Google Books.

Commentary: Madeline White (April 2022), drawn from Stephen Harris (June 2020)