In many ways, Jonathan Couch was a prototype of the Victorian provincial naturalist, a trained physician whose eclectic, but intensely local interests ran from the life sciences to geology, Cornish folk beliefs, and local history. His major works included a three-volume translation of Pliny's Natural History (London, 1847-1849) published by the Wernerian Club of London, The History of Polperro (Truro, 1871), and the exhaustive four-volume A History of the Fishes of the British Islands (London, 1862-1868). The remnants of a wide-ranging mind, the Couch Papers contain a sampling of correspondence, rough drafts of articles, and notes on a variety of topics of interest to the Cornish naturalist and antiquarian, Jonathan Couch. The bulk of the correspondence relates to Couch's translation of Pliny's Natural History, published by the Wernerian Club of London between 1847 and 1849. The notes are highly diverse, but include some systematic descriptions of fishes, probably used in his A History of the Fishes of the British Islands and notes Cornish folk beliefs. Of particular interest are his "Notes connected with instinct and reason" and three manuscripts relating to evolutionism: "Enquiry into the circumstances...," "On the history and development of man," and "The Natural History of the Creation of the World, with its changes to the subsidence of the flood and Noah."

One of the most important natural historians in nineteenth century Britain, Charles Darwin provided the first compelling mechanism to account for organismal evolutionary change. Although lacking a coherent model of heredity, Darwin's natural selection has exerted an enormous influence over the biological sciences and since the introduction of Mendelian genetics, had remained the key unifying principle in the discipline. The APS Darwin Papers are a large a valuable assemblage of Darwin's correspondence with scientific colleagues, including Charles Lyell and George J. Romanes. They are included in the print version of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge Univ. Press).