MORISON, ROBERT

(b. Dundee, Scotland, 1620; d. London, England, 11 November 1683)

botany.

Morison was the son of John Morison and his wife, Anna Gray. He was educated at Aberdeen University, where he obtained the M.A. in 1638. He taught at that university until his career was interrupted by the Civil War. In 1644, after fighting against the Covenanters, he fled to France as a Royalist. Morison studied medicine at Paris and obtained an M.D. at Angers in 1648. Botany quickly became his main interest, an interest that led to his appointment as gardener to Gaston d’Orléans at Blois. He undertook extensive journeys to collect material for the gardens and probably contributed to the catalog of the Blois garden and was regarded as a suitable authority to revise the first English plant list, Phytologia Britannica (1650).

Charles II brought Morison back to England at the Restoration in 1660 as royal physician and botanist. In 1669 he became the first professor of botany at Oxford. His activities were closely related to the Oxford botanical garden, founded forty years earlier. Its gardener, Jacob Bobart the younger, became Morison’s closest colleague. At Oxford, Morison’s duties were not onerous, allowing him ample leisure for the compilation of his major botanical works.

Morison’s first publication, Praeludia botanica (1669), was a composite volume containing an augmented list of the plants at Blois arranged according to the orthodox classification; critical animadversions on the taxonomic work of Jean and Gaspard Bauhin; and an intriguing dialogue announcing his dissatisfaction with current approaches to a plant classification. The latter stressed the need for a single, key criterion for determining the nota generica, or natural relationships, of plants. He revived Cesalpino’s suggestion that classification should be based on fruit and seed characteristics.

This principle was first applied in Morison’s monograph on umbelliferous plants (1672), which successfully isolated the Umbelliferae from other plants with similar inflorescence forms. The family was then subdivided into a series of genera that closely resembled later categories. Vegetative characteristics were consulted only for subsidiary taxonomic affinities.

Morison next endeavored to apply his taxonomic principles to the entire plant kingdom. Like so many similar enterprises this was destined for a fragmentary conclusion. He pursued the work with great enthusiasm, however, even obtaining substantial financial assistance from Oxford and private patrons to meet the cost of publishing his voluminous illustrated Historia plantarum. Part I, on trees, was thought to exist by contemporaries but was never published. Morison himself published part II (1680), and his colleague Bobart completed part III (1699). Bobart also assembled an herbarium of 5,000 plants organized to illustrate Morison’s system. The published sections of the Historia include about 6,000 plants. Those in part II are described in considerable detail, and the illustrations are of higher quality than has usually been appreciated by modern commentators. The crucial system of classification was a poor application of Morison’s original idea. His taxonomic principle was not followed consistently, vegetative criteria frequently being invoked to establish major divisions. Hence Morison’s system had many of the defects which it was designed to counteract.

In reputation Morison was quickly eclipsed by his gifted contemporary John Ray. This decline in fortune was undoubtedly reinforced by the excessively critical tone of his writings and his false claims to originality. Thus even during his lifetime Morison was a relatively isolated figure, avoiding association with such major organizations as the Royal Society and the London College of Physicians. Certain major taxonomists, however, recognized the importance of his declared principles. Both Tournefort and Linnaeus regarded Morison as the “instaurator” of taxonomy. His pioneer attempt to apply a single, clear taxonomic criterion to the whole plant kingdom had the potential to rescue taxonomy from a state of strangled confusion resulting from the rapid accumulation of data.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Morison’s writings are Hortus regius Blesensis auctus, praeludium botanicorum (London, 1669), known as Praeludia botanica; Plantarum umbelliferarum distributio nova (Oxford, 1672); Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis pars secunda (Oxford, 1680); and Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis pars tertia, Jacob Bobart, ed. (Oxford, 1699), introduced with a biographical sketch of Morison by Archibald Pitcairne.

Morison also edited Paulo Boccone’s Icones et descriptiones rariorum plantarum … (Oxford, 1674).

II. Secondary Literature. See G. S. Boulger, “Robert Morison,” in Dictionary of National Biography, XIII (1967-1968), 958–960; J. Reynolds Green, A History of Botany in the United Kingdom (London, 1914), 98–110; R. Pulteney, Historical and Biographical Sketches of the Progress of Botany, I (London, 1790), 289–327; and S. H. Vines, “Robert Morison and John Ray,” in Makers of British Botany, F. W. Oliver, ed. (Cambridge, 1913), 8–43; and An Account of the Morisonian Herbarium (Oxford, 1914).

Charles Webster