This collection includes ca. 200 letters to and from Harvey's family, concerning Quakers, the Missouri Compromise, slavery, the depression of 1819-1820. There is also a commonplace book (1819-1820, 1821 Aug.), with observations on a balloon ascension of 2 Aug. 1819 from Vauxhall Gardens in England, slavery, Indians, and descriptions of Washington and Baltimore. There are also journals of trips to Niagara Falls and Canada in 1820 and to the American West, from Baltimore to Louisville and back, with an added description of a voyage around Long Island aboard the Robert Fulton in August 1821.

T. Martin Trippe was an avid amateur ornithologist from Orange, New Jersey, who spent the majority of his free time as a teenager and young man exploring the woods and observing, shooting, and collecting birds. After graduating from New York University with a degree in engineering in 1869, Trippe worked in various positions for the Iowa Central, Northern Pacific, and Albia, Knoxville, and Des Moines Railroads, continuing to devote his spare time in the interests of ornithology. The two surviving volumes of Trippe's journals document his ornithological and natural historical observations between 1865 and 1871, including meticulously detailed records of the avifauna (and to lesser degree other fauna) in central New Jersey, central Iowa, and southern Minnesota. They include detailed, and Trippe provided year-end taxonomic and meteorological indexes for 1869, 1870, and 1871.

A physician, natural historian, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815) was one of the central figures in Philadelphia's early national scientific establishment. Having received his medical training in European universities, Barton was appointed Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1789, lecturing on botany, materia medica, natural history. A prolific author, he established his reputation as one of the nation's preeminent botanists through his botanical text book The Elements of Botany (1803), but his contribtions to zoology, ethnology, and medicine were equally noteworthy. Barton's monograph on the "fascinating faculty" of the rattlesnake and his efforts in historical linguistics (New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, 1798) were widely read, and his Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal (1804-1809) was one of the nation's first medical journals and an important outlet for natural historical research. The Barton Papers offer a comprehensive view of the professional work of Benjamin Smith Barton from the time of his return to the United States in 1789 until his death. The collection is divided into five series: Correspondence, Subject Files, Bound Volumes, Graphic Materials, and Printing Plates. The collection includes a particularly valuable series of botanical, medical, and natural historical drawings collected by Barton for research, reference, and publication. Among the many artists represented are William Bartram, Frederick Pursh, Pierre Turpin, and Benjamin Henry Latrobe.