An extensive, Latin-language treatise on natural philosophy written by the French savant and Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, Joseph François Marie in 1763-1764. Some chapters in the work appear to have minor lacunae.

Charles Morton's "System of Physicks" was among the most important texts in natural philosophy in early America, used to teach science and the scientific method to students at both Harvard and Yale from the late 1680s through the 1720s. This fair copy was probably transcribed at one of those institutions in about 1700, and is a fairly complete accounting of Morton's best known work.

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.

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.

The Scientists Collection is comprised of individual letters and small groups of correspondence from American, British, French, and German scientists during the past three centuries. Although the content is highly varied, there is significant strength in astronomy, natural history, conchology, and geology. Among the scientists better represented in the collection are the astronomers William Radcliffe Birt, J.F.W. Herschel, and Franz Xaver von Zach; the conchologists A.D. Brown, Fred L. Button, Otto Mörch, Alfred Newton, Christian M. Poulsen, Temple Prime, Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy, and A. G. Wetherby; the physical scientists George Biddell Airy, Arnold Sommerfeld, Ferdinand R. Hassler, and Max Planck; the archaeologist Jean François Nadaillac; the philosopher William Whewell; and the naturalists Walter Henry Bates, Robert Chambers, Edme Dupuget, Robert Kaye Greville, Joseph Henry, John Stevens Henslow, John Lubbock, and Herbert Spencer.