John Woodward (naturalist)

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.

[1] 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.

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.

Woodward claimed that his experimental evidence showed that smallpox arose from an excess of "bilious salts", whereas Freind saw the causes of the disease as unknowable.

[9] The shield, now in the British Museum, is recognised as a classicising French Renaissance buckler of the mid-16th century, perhaps sold from the Royal Armouries of Charles II, but thought by Woodward and others to be Roman.

Woodward published a treatise on it in 1713, provoking a satire on the "follies of antiquarianism" by Alexander Pope, written in the same year, but not printed until 1733.

Woodward's will directed that his personal estate and effects be sold, and land to the yearly value of £150 purchased and conveyed to the University of Cambridge.