Grew was the only son of
Obadiah Grew (1607–1688),
Nonconformist divine and vicar of St Michaels,
Coventry, and was born in
Warwickshire. He graduated at
Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1661, and ten years later took the degree of
MD at
Leiden University, his thesis being
Disputatio medico-physica de liquore nervoso. He began observations on the anatomy of plants in 1664, and in 1670 his essay,
The Anatomy of Vegetables begun, was communicated to the
Royal Society by
Bishop Wilkins, on whose recommendation he was in the following year elected a fellow. In 1672, when the essay was published, he settled in
London, and soon acquired an extensive practice as a
physician. In 1673 he published his
Idea of a Phytological History, which consisted of papers he had communicated to the
Royal Society in the preceding year, and in 1677 he succeeded
Henry Oldenburg as secretary of the society. He edited the
Philosophical Transactions in 1678–1679, and in 1681 he published by request a descriptive catalogue of the rarities preserved at
Gresham College, with which were printed some papers he had read to the Royal Society on the
Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts. In 1682 appeared his great work on the
Anatomy of Plants, which also was largely a collection of previous publications. It was divided into four books,
Anatomy of Vegetables begun,
Anatomy of Roots,
Anatomy of Trunks and
Anatomy of Leaves, Flowers, Fruits and Seeds, and was illustrated with eighty-two plates, while appended to it were seven papers mostly of a chemical character. The
Anatomy is especially notable for its descriptions of plant structure. He described nearly all the key differences of
morphology of stem and root, showed that the flowers of the
Asteraceae are built of multiple units, and correctly hypothesized that
stamens are male organs.
Anatomy of Plants also contains the first known microscopic description of
pollen. Much of Grew's pioneering work with the
microscope was contemporary with that of
Marcello Malpighi (b.1628-d.1694), and the two reportedly borrowed freely from one another. Grew's work on
pollen was more extensive than that of
Malpighi, leading to the discovery that although all pollen is roughly globular, size and shape is different between species; however, pollen grains within a species are all alike. This discovery is central to the field of
palynology. Among his other publications were
Seawater made Fresh (1684), the
Nature and Use of the Salt contained in Epsom and such other Waters (1697), which was a rendering of his
Tractatus de salis (1693), and
Cosmologia Sacra (1701).
Linnaeus named a genus of trees
Grewia in his honour. At
Pembroke there is a stained-glass representation of a page of his work in the college's Library. Grew is also considered to be one of the pioneers of
dactyloscopy. He was the first person to study and describe ridges, furrows, and pores on hand and foot surfaces. In 1684, he published accurate drawings of
finger ridge patterns. Grew was a proponent of
mercantilism. ==Works==