In over 200 years from foundation to the present day, the Society has built up a wealth of comprehensive and continuous archive material.

The archives were catalogued professionally in 2015 and the catalogue is available to view on ArchiveSearch.

Access to all these records is welcomed for the purpose of any bona fide research. If you would like to access the archives please follow the link above to the ArchiveSearch site.

Arrangement of the archives: The archives have been arranged largely by their function; constitutional records, Council records, financial records, membership records etc. Each section and sub-section is arranged broadly chronologically.

Covering dates: 1799-2014. As you can see, some papers, for example, personal papers of members, predate the foundation of the Society.

While not on public display, the archives can be viewed by prior arrangement with the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

The Cambridge Philosophical Society Archives catalogue is available as a PDF download.

Photo: CPS 12/1 Anthropometric Committee record cards. The beginnings of ‘big data’, can be found in a project sponsored by the Philosophical Society. In 1886 the Cambridge Anthropometric Committee began recording anthropometric data for university students, a project which ran for two decades and produced around 9,000 personalised cards.

Photo: CPS 10/3/1 Copper plate engravings. One of 26 copper plates in our archive which date from around 1826-1833. These plates were used to produce illustrations in the early publications of Cambridge Philosophical Society.

The Society archives include the following:

• Minutes of Council and of General Meetings
• Membership and subscription records
• Archives relating to the various premises occupied by the Society
• Archives relating to the Society’s publications
• Archives of the Library and Reading Room predating 1976 (the date at which the Library, by then known as the Scientific Periodicals Library and later as the Central Science Library, became a dependent library of Cambridge University Library)
• Archives relating to events and activities
• Some archives of individual members, such as Sir Joseph Larmor (1857-1942, physicist and mathematician)

Photo: A copy of Biological Reviews, issue 37, 1962.

Photo: CPS 10/3/3. Hand-coloured illustration of Rhombus Maderensis from ‘On the fishes of Madeira’ by Richard Thomas Lowe and published in ‘Transactions’ of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol 6. in 1838.