John Woodward (1 May 1665 – 25 April 1728) was an English naturalist, antiquarian and geologist, and founder by bequest of the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology at the University of Cambridge. Though a leading supporter of observation and experiment in what we now call science, few of his theories have survived. Life Woodward was born on 1 May 1665 or perhaps 1668, in a village, possibly Wirksworth, in Derbyshire. His family may have been from Gloucestershire; his mother's maiden surname was Burdett. At the age of 16 he went to London to be apprenticed to a linen draper, but he later studied medicine with Dr Peter Barwick, physician to Charles II. As a leading physician who had never been to university, Woodward was a prominent figure on the "modern" side in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in early 18th-century England, on the medical and other fronts. In 1692 Woodward was appointed Gresham Professor of Physic and in 1693 elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1695 he was made an M.D. by Archbishop Tenison and by Cambridge University. In 1702 he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Woodward died on 25 April 1728 and was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey. In 1732 a memorial to Woodward by the sculptor Peter Scheemakers was erected in the Abbey. Works In 1699, John Woodward published his water-culture (hydroponic) experiments with spearmint. He found that plants in less pure water sources grew better than plants in distilled water. While still a student, he became interested in botany and natural history, and his attention during visits to Gloucestershire was drawn to the fossils found there. He began to form the great collection, for which he is known. He published An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, especially Minerals, &c. in 1695 (2nd ed. 1702, 3rd ed. 1723), followed by Brief Instructions for making Observations in all Parts of the World (1696). He later wrote An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England (2 vols., 1728 and 1729). In these works he showed that the stony surface of the earth was divided into strata, and that the enclosed fossils were originally generated at sea; but his views on the method of rock formation remained unsupported. They were satirized by John Arbuthnot, who ridiculed what he saw as Woodward's classicist