Principally on bees and bee-keeping, especially correspondence and official documentation relating to Langstroth's efforts to win legal recognition of his invention of the movable-frame beehive. There are also fragments of an autobiography, newspaper clippings and pamphlets. Correspondents include editors of bee journals, and manufacturers and suppliers of materials for apiaries, as well as other apiarists. Some items of personal correspondence are also included in the collection.

A philosopher, metaphysician, and mathematician, Chauncey Wright graduated from Harvard in 1852 and taught occasionally at the College while employed as a "computer" with the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. A positivist and empiricist in the British tradition, he exerted an influence on the development of American Pragmatism through his younger friends William James, Charles S. Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, but is perhaps best remembered as one of the earliest and most able defenders of Darwinism and Darwinian natural selection. The bulk of the 137 items in the Wright Papers is comprised of personal letters addressed to Wright during the adult years of his brief life. From the typical letters of a college student, the correspondence branches out to touch upon philosophy, mathematics, and Wright's meeting with Darwin in 1872. Among the more prominent correspondents are C. S. Peirce, Charles Eliot Norton, Francis Bowen, Susan and J. Peter Lesley, and James Bradley Thayer and William Sydney Thayer.

This collection includes letters, diaries, notebooks, and early photographs, relating primarily to the Wister family of Germantown and Philadelphia. Much of the correspondence concerns domestic news and consists of letters from or to Sarah Wister. These include interesting observations on Germantown and Philadelphia society from other families as well, such as the Bayntons and Bullocks. There are numerous letters from various Wisters, including Casper, Charles Jones, Elizabeth (including a journal of a trip to Bristol, 1783), Hannah, John, Owen Jones, and others. There is also poetry by Sarah.