This collection of scientific and technical periodicals will interest students of nineteenth-century North and South American as well as European science. With documents from fields such as mathematics, natural history, physics, geology, and chemistry, the collection covers journals, lecture collections, and society proceedings. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, offers one of the most complete collections of scientific research and knowledge in the long nineteenth century, now available to the modern scholar in digital form.

Through this collection, the critical reader can trace the trajectory of scientific discovery and theory throughout the nineteenth century as journals became ever more specialized. Researchers can follow the discourse between scholars on either side of the Atlantic in fields as diverse as entomology, mineralogy, petrography, and zoology. The collection ranges from obscure and short-lived publications, such as Révue entomologique (1833–1837) or Vermont's Archives of Science (1870–1874), to the proceedings of significant institutions including the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, the Royal Geographical Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The scope of articles and authors available in this collection is formidable. A single journal may include some of the most vital work in the field available at the time. For instance, the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia begins in 1817 with an article by the French naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesueur on six newly discovered species of fish, complete with his drawings, and concludes one hundred years later with a series of richly illustrated articles by the archeologist Clarence B. Moore. Similarly, the first volume of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society contains articles by Alfred Russel Wallace, David Livingstone, Wilhelm Karl von Haidinger, and Alexander von Humboldt. Specific scientific controversies can be tracked through the pages of these journals; most notably, the scientific debate over Darwinian theory, addressed in numerous journals from the Cistula Entomologica to the Zoologist.

The collection has a wide geographical reach, including publications from the Congo, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the former Duchy of Nassau, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Uruguay, offering a broad account of nineteenth-century scientific inquiry, much of it not well known in the United States. Many of these journals require specialized language skills, such as the Hungarian Természetrajzi füzetek, published between 1877 and 1902, or the Swedish publication Bihang till Kongl (1872–1903), though most of these publications are accessible in English. The Scientific and Technical Periodicals collection is an invaluable resource for individual researchers and an essential addition to any scientific institution's collection.