James, an eminent optician, was born in Edinburgh, on the 22d of June in the year 1710. At ten years of age, having lost his father and mother, and being left in a state of indigence, he was received into Heriot's Hospital, where he soon displayed his mechanical genius, in constructing for himself little chests, book-cases, and other conveniences, with such tools as fell in his way. At the age of twelve he was removed from the Hospital to the High School, where he showed a considerable taste for classical literature, and generally kept at the head of his forms. In the year 1726 he entered the university, where he passed through the usual course of education, and took his master's degree with great applause.

By his friends he was intended for the church; but after attending a course of theological lectures, his mind revolted from a profession which he thought little suited to his talents, and he devoted his whole time to mathematical and mechanical pursuits. He had been fortunate enough to have the celebrated Maclaurin for his preceptor, who having soon discovered the bent of his genius, encouraged him to prosecute those studies in which nature had qualified him to make the greatest figure. Under the eye of that eminent master, he began in 1732 to construct Gregorian telescopes; and, as the professor observed in a letter to Dr. Jurin, "by taking care of the figure of his specula, he was enabled to give them larger apertures, and to carry them to greater perfection than had ever been done before him."

In the year 1736 Mr. Short was called to London, at the desire of Queen Caroline, to give instructions in mathematics to the Duke of Cumberland; and immediately on his appointment to that honourable office, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and patronized by the Earls of Morton and Macclesfield. In the year 1739 he accompanied the former of these noblemen to the Orkney Isles, where he was employed in adjusting the geography of that part of Scotland; and happy it was for him that he was so employed, as he might otherwise have been involved in a scuffle which took place between the retainers of Sir James Stewart of Barra and the attendants of the earl, in which some of the latter were dangerously wounded.

Mr. Short having returned to London, and finally established himself there in the line of his profession, was, in 1742, employed by Lord Thomas Spencer to make for him a reflector of twelve feet focus, for which he received six hundred guineas. He made several other telescopes of the same focal distance with greater improvements and higher magnifiers; and in 1752 finished one for the king of Spain, for which, with its whole apparatus, he received twelve hundred pounds. This was the noblest instrument of the kind that had then been constructed, and perhaps it has never yet been surpassed, except by the astonishing reflectors of Herschel.

Mr. Short used to visit the place of his nativity once every two or three years during his residence in London, and in 1766 he visited it for the last time. On the 15th of June 1768 he died, after a very short illness, at Newington Butts, near London, of a mortification in his bowels, and was buried on the 22d of the same month, having completed his fiftieth year.

Smoker-Hand Writing. (See Stenography.)