WILLIAM

See also:

• WILLIAM MACLURE (1763-1840)

MACLURE (1763-1840)  , American geologist, was born at Ayr in Scotland in 1763 . After a brief visit to New York in 1782 he began active life as a partner in a London firm of American merchants . In 1796 business affairs took him to Virginia, U.S.A., which he thereafter made his home . In 1803 he visited France as one of the commissioners appointed to settle the claims of American citizens on the French government; and during the few years then spent in Europe he applied himself with enthusiasm to the study of geology . On his return home in 1807 he commenced the self-imposed task of making a geological survey of the United States . Almost every state in the Union was traversed and mapped by him, the Alleghany Mountains being crossed and recrossed some fifty times . The results of his unaided labours were submitted to the American Philosophical Society in a memoir entitled Observations on the Geology of the United States explanatory of a Geological Map, and published in the Society's Transactions (vol. iv . 1809, p . 91) together with the first geological map of that country . This antedates William Smith's geological map of England by six years . In 1817 Maclure brought before the same society a revised edition of his map, and his great geological memoir was issued separately, with some additional matter, under the title Observations on ithe Geology of the United States of America . Subsequent survey has corroborated the general accuracy of Maclure's observations .

In 1819 he visited

Spain, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish an agricultural college near the city of Alicante . Returning to America in 1824, he settled for some years at New Harmony, Indiana, and sought to develop his scheme of the agricultural college . Failing health ultimately constrained him to relinquish the attempt, and to seek (in 1827) a more con-genial climate in Mexico . There, at San Angel, he died on the 23rd of March 1840 . See S . G . Morton, " Memoir of William Maclure," Amer . Journ . Sri., vol. xlvii . (1844), p . I .