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.

This work contains some material on electricity. There are also 14 plates, representing the essential elements of mathematics, physics, and cosmography.

The papers of the Italian natural philosopher and electrician, Giambatista Beccaria (1716-1781) contain letters to Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Banks, Laura Bassi, Gian Francesco Cigna, and others on a variety of scientific topics, including atmospheric and terrestrial electricity, the aurora borealis, earthquakes, meteorology, and phosphorescence. In addition to Beccaria's epistolary essays, the collection includes several journals of meteorological observations and notes for Giovanni Eandi's biography of Beccaria.

This treatise includes experiments on eletricity (with mentions of B. Franklin), ballooning (mentions of J. P. Blanchard), pharmacology, chemistr, and hydraulics. Included is a sketch of Woulfe's bottle for passing gases through liquids (Peter Woulfe, 1767).