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."

A military officer and civilian superintendent of the École Polytechnique in Paris, Albert de Rochas became one of the best known psychic researchers in late nineteenth century France. His interests centered on uncovering the laws behind psychic forces, somnambulism, magnetism and mesmerism, hypnotism, perception, and reincarnation. A prolific writer, he studied a number of Spiritualist and Spiritist mediums, including Maria Mayo (Lina), Eusapia Paladino, and D. D. Home. Despite the relatively small size of the collection, the papers of Albert de Rochas open an important window onto the development of psychic science in fin de siecle France and onto the cultural impact of Spiritualism. The collection includes a scattered, but valuable selection of correspondence with fellow psychic researchers, editors, mediums, and other individuals interested in psychic research, and a valuable set of 69 spirit and psychic photographs, that Rochas collected as evidence of psychic forces, and as documentation of séances, mediums, and "sensitives." Rochas' work on the exteriorization of sensibility and studies of Lina, Charles Bailey, and Paladino are relatively well documented, and his interests in the laws of psychic phenomena, reincarnation, and the exmigration of the living soul run throughout.