Letter 4441

Short returns two of Sloane’s books and sends ‘the long promised garden knife’. He thanks Sloane for lending the books and sending the paper from the Philosophical Transactions. Short cannot afford to purchase a complete collection of the Transactions. He has asked two London booksellers to collect what copies they come across for him. Sloane and the Royal Society can expect to hear from Short in the summer when he has ‘finished [his] natural History & tryalls of the waters’. Short discusses his experiments with mineral waters. He received a letter from Dr Mead stating he would send ‘many fine things’. Thomas Short was a Scottish physician who settled in Sheffield. He traveled throughout England examining the medical effects of mineral waters and published works promoting their use in 1725 and 1766 (Norman Moore, Short, Thomas (c.16901772), rev. Patrick Wallis, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25461, accessed 24 July 2013]).