John Eddowes Bowman the Elder (30 October 1785 – 4 December 1841) was a British banker and naturalist.
His education was only that of a grammar school, but he was a bookish boy, and got from his father a taste for botany, and from his friend Joseph Hunter, then a lad at Sheffield, a fondness for genealogy.
He wished to enter the ministry of the Unitarian body to which his family belonged, but his father dissuaded him.
Its failure in 1816 left him penniless, and he became manager at Welshpool of a branch of the bank of Beck & Co. of Shrewsbury.
He contributed papers to the Transactions of the Linnean and other learned societies, and to London's Magazine of Natural History.