which he exchanged on that date for the rectory of Stapylford; he was also rector of Farleigh. In 1438 he graduated bachelor of canon law from Broadgates Hall (afterwards Pembroke College), Oxford, and on 11 April 1443 was collated to the prebend of Wildland in St. Paul's Cathedral. He resigned his prebend on his election on 14 May 1446 as precentor of Salisbury Cathedral. In 1452 he went on a mission to Rome to obtain the canonisation of Osmund [q. v.], the founder of Salisbury. He reached Rome on 27 June, returning in May 1453 without accomplishing his object. He died in 1457 before 15 July, and was buried in Salisbury Cathedral.
Upton was the author of an elaborate work entitled ‘Libellus de Officio Militari;’ it was dedicated to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and was therefore written before 1446. It consists of four parts: (1) ‘De Coloribus in Armis et eorum Nobilitate ac Differentia;’ (2) ‘De Regulis et de Signis;’ (3) ‘De Animalibus et de Avibus in Armis portatis;’ (4) ‘De Militia et eorum [sic] Nobilitate.’ A fifteenth-century manuscript of the work, possibly the original, is Addit. MS. 30946 in the British Museum; a fifteenth-century copy is in Cottonian MS. Nero C. iii.; and later copies are in Harleian MSS. 3504 and 6106, and in Trinity College, Oxford, MS. xxxvi.; extracts from it are contained in Stowe MS. 1047, f. 252, and in Rawlinson MSS. (Bodleian Library) B. 20 and B. 107. The book, largely used by Francis Thynne [q. v.], was edited by Sir Edward Bysshe [q. v.] from Sir Robert Cotton's manuscript, and another belonging to Matthew Hale, both procured for Bysshe by John Selden; it was entitled ‘Nicholai Vptoni de Studio Militari’ (London, 1654, fol.; two copies are in the Brit. Mus. Libr.).
A later Sir Nicholas Upton (d. 1551), son of John Upton of Lupton, Devonshire, was turcopolier of the knights of St. John, and was killed by sunstroke in July 1551 during a gallant defence of Malta at the head of thirty knights and four hundred volunteers against Dragut, the Turkish admiral. The grandmaster, John d'Omedes, declared his death to be a national loss (Lodge, Irish Peerage, vii. 154–5; Vertot, Hist. of Knights of St. John, iii. 261; Sutherland, Knights of Malta, ii. 143; Whitworth Porter, p. 728; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. viii. 192, ix. 81, xi. 200, 4th ser. iv. 477, 6th ser. xii. passim, 7th ser. i. 118, 171).
[Preface to Bysshe's ed. of De Studio Militari, 1654, cf. Tanner MS. 21, f. 159; manuscript copies in Brit. Mus. Libr.; Bekynton Corresp. (Rolls Ser.), i. 265; Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, ed. Bradshaw, i. 406; Newcourt's Repertor. Eccl.; Hennessy's Novum Rep. pp. xlix, 55; Kirby's Winchester Scholars, p. 36; Prince's Worthies of Devon; Le Neve's Fasti, ed. Hardy; Fuller's Worthies; Tanner's Bibl. Brit.-Hib.; Wood's Life and Times, ed. Clark, iii. 467 n.; Maclean's Pembroke College, p. 66.]
URCHARD, Sir THOMAS (1611-1660), author and translator. [See Urquhart.]
URE, ANDREW (1778–1857), chemist and scientific writer, was born at Glasgow on 18 May 1778. He studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities, and graduated M.D. at Glasgow in 1801. In 1804, on the resignation of Dr. George Birkbeck [q. v.], he was appointed professor of chemistry and natural philosophy in the Andersonian University, later Anderson's College, Glasgow. In 1809 he took an active part in the foundation of the Glasgow Observatory, and in connection with this work visited London, where he made the acquaintance of Nevil Maskelyne [q. v.], Sir Humphry Davy [q. v.], William Hyde Wollaston [q. v.], and others. He resided at the observatory for some years. About this time he established a course of popular scientific lectures for working men in Glasgow, probably the first of its kind. An official report of M. (later Baron) Charles Dupin on Ure's lectures led to the establishment of similar courses at the École des Arts et Métiers in Paris. In 1818 he published an important series of determinations on the specific gravity of solutions of sulphuric acid of varying strengths. On 10 Dec. 1818 he read a paper before the Glasgow Literary Society on electrical experiments he had made on the murderer Clydsdale after his execution. He suggested, following up the work of Alexander Philip Wilson Philip [q. v.], that by stimulating the phrenic nerve, the vagus, or the great sympathetic, life might be restored in cases of suffocation from noxious vapours, drowning, &c. His experiments created a considerable sensation. In 1821 he published a ‘Dictionary of Chemistry,’ founded on that of William Nicholson (1753–1815) [q. v.] Ure, in his article on ‘Equivalents,’ shows excellent discernment in dealing with the important chemical theories of the time; he follows the views of Wollaston and Davy rather than those of Dalton as put forward by their author, and adopts Berzelius's notation for the elements, then only just proposed, but adopted universally later. This ‘Dictionary of Chemistry’ attained a fourth edition in 1835, and formed the basis of that of Henry Watts [q. v.] in 1863. It was translated into French by J. Riffault in
