This volume, written between May 3 and December 2, includes essays on mineralogy, the vegetable kingdom (such as botany and fruitification), and the animal kingdom (such as zoology, ornithology, and generation of animals).

An early Welsh emigrant to Pennsylvania, David Evans was educated at Yale (1713) before answering the call to Presbyterian pulpits in the Welsh Tract of Delaware and Pennsylvania, and to the church at Pilesgrove, N.J. Written entirely in Latin in 1747 when Evans was 66 years old, the Aliquot Rudimenta Physicae consists of four separate compendia bound together, the Compendium Technologiae, Logicae, Rhetoricae, and Physicae. The work is an interesting and thorough attempt to summarize a system of knowledge with impeccable American provenance.

Notes kept by the Yale undergraduate John Austin Stevens on 20 lectures on natural philosophy delivered by Jeremiah Day during the fall, 1812. Includes lectures on gravitation, mechanics, and hydrostatics (hydrology), the last including theories of rivers, springs, and groundwater.

By an unknown author, this notebook is of experiments and the history of experiments with electricity, containing references to Franklin, Beccaria, and Priestley, etc.

In 1839-1840, the ichthyologist Richard Parnell left London for a collecting expedition to Jamaica and a tour of museum collections in the United States. An authority on both fishes and grasses, Parnell published two noted works as a young man, his Prize Essay on the Natural and Economical History of the Fishes Marine, Fluviatile, and Lacustrine, of the River District of the Firth of Forth (Edinburgh: Neill and Co., 1838) and The Grasses of Britain, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1842-1845). He appears, however, to have abandoned publication in 1845, although he continued collecting for many years. The notebook kept by Richard Parnell during his voyage to the West Indies and United States in 1839-1840 contains little narrative, but dozens of pencil and watercolor sketches of the marine life that absorbed his interest, primarily fishes. Most sketches are accompanied by brief notes on the anatomy of the fish, sometimes with close-ups of fin structures, air bladders, or the digestive tract and stomach. Although collecting localities are seldom recorded, the majority of specimens seem to have been collected in Jamaica, with at least a few observed in vitro at the New York Museum.

These journals were kept while on the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806).

Initially proposed by Peter Legaux at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in 1793, the Vine Company of Pennsylvania was a stock company that encouraged the domestic production of grapes, wines, and brandy, and dissemination of knowledge about viticulture. After its incorporation in 1802, the Company operated vineyards on Legaux's farm at Spring Mill, 13 miles northwest of Philadelphia, until it failed in 1822. The three volumes of Journals of the Vine Company of Pennsylvania record the daily operations of America's first commercial vineyard bewteeen 1803 and 1814. Kept by the superintendent, Peter Legaux, the journals provide careful records of weather, planting, harvesting and other field work, as well as some of the doings of the officers and shareholders of the Company. The fourth volume is essentially a weather diary kept by Legaux at Spring Mill from 1822 until his death in 1827. The last volume of Vine Company records covering the last eight years of its operation, 1814-1822, has been lost.

This volume is a finished manuscript copy, probably earlier than the "Westover Manuscripts," from which this varies slightly. Byrd interpolated into the narrative of his tour remarks on Indian customs, religion, warfare, and trade, in addition to observations on his Saponi guides. Several pages were added in 1817 in the hand of Nicholas Trist.

This is a small group of letters written to Johann Ambrosius Beurer, J. von Sprehelson, and Christoph Jacob Trew.

Miscellaneous letters from and to Benjamin Smith Barton, Nicholas Collin, Henry Muhlenberg, Jeremy Belknap, Monsieur Le Roi, and a broadside by Robert Aitken. These letters concern botany and zoology in the U.S., England, and on the Continent, and mention contemporary figures as well as the American Philosophical Society.