170 Reviews — Ure’s Biography. 
Ure, like many of his countrymen of note, had his position to make 
in the world. He was an operative weaver, as was his father 
before him,—and just as Hugh Miller was a stonemason. But, like 
the latter, he had a strong thirst for other knowledge than that of 
his profession. He sought and obtained a good education. He was 
schoolmaster a while. ‘Then he procured licence to preach, and 
became assistant to the minister at Kilbride, with a salary of ten | 
pounds a year and his maintenance. While thus situated he had, 
or made, opportunities for gratifying his love for natural history. 
He worked hard at the geology of his parish and that of Rutherglen. 
He investigated after a fashion that was somewhat novel in those 
days ; for it was then customary to write about the earth and its 
origin without examining it. But David Ure went grubbing and 
poking about among the rocks exposed on the hills and in the glens 
of Western Scotland, collecting fossils and facts relating to physical 
geology—thereby seeing things as they were, and not as they might 
or ought to have been. ‘The result of these investigations he pub- 
lished in the work by which he is now so well known,—‘ The His- 
tory of Rutherglen and East Kilbride.’ 
There must have been something decidedly practical in the 
appearance of Ure during his field-workings. Short of stature and 
a hard walker, he could withstand almost any amount of fatigue. A 
great-coat, with one large pocket for specimens and another for 
bread and cheese, usually accompanied him. <A bit of sward beside 
a spring as usually formed his dining-place; though on rare occa- 
sions, when he felt inclined, or could afford to dissipate, he would 
eat his cheese and bread in the kitchen of some village ale-house. 
Along with him he carried a tin-box for stowing plants; a large 
cudgel, armed with steel, so as to serve both as spade and pickaxe; 
a few small chisels and other tools; a blowpipe, with its appurte- 
nances; a small chemical apparatus, optical instruments, &c. His 
friends called him a walking-laboratory; and certainly he must have 
looked rather like something of the sort when so accoutred. 
In 1796, Lord Buchan presented him with a living in Linlithgow- 
shire. Two years afterwards he died. 
Ure’s ‘History of Rutherglen and East Kilbride’ describes the 
antiquities as well as the natural history of these parishes. Eleven 
of the plates are devoted to illustrating the Carboniferous fossils 
which he had collected ; and these are so carefully delineated as to 
be easily identified by modern paleontologists. From the illus- 
trations it is evident that Ure knew and figured between eighty and 
ninety species of Carboniferous vegetable and animal fossils, which 
have been since rediscovered and named after the Linnean method 
by_other authors. Among the fossils figured are some species of 
bivalve Entomostraca, the minuteness of which shows that Ure 
observed small things as well as great. It is only within the last 
few years that attention has been again drawn to these interesting 
though minute fossils; more than thirty species of which have been 
lately discovered in the Carboniferous strata of the West of Scotland, 
