[The journal of A.V. Humboldt in Spain]. / El diario de Alexander von Humboldt en España.

The Spanish diary can surprisingly not be found in his bounded diaries from his American travels, but in a separate folder of his legacy in Berlin, where Humboldt collected material which he wanted to use for his publication about Spain. So it remained undiscovered until recently. Humboldt's notes contain geognostic descriptions as well as his observations about climate, vegetation, electricity of the atmosphere, etc. The comparison with Humboldt's publication of 1825 facilitates to gain insight into his scientific methods.

How science survived: medieval manuscripts' "demography" and classic texts' extinction.

Determining what fraction of texts and manuscripts have survived from Antiquity and the Middle Ages has been highly problematic. Analyzing the transmission of texts as the "paleodemography" of their manuscripts yields definite and surprisingly high estimates. Parchment copies of the foremost medieval textbooks on arithmetical and calendrical calculation closely fit age distributions expected for populations with logistic growth and manuscripts with exponential survivorship. The estimated half-lives of copies agree with Bischoff's paleographically based suggestion that roughly one in seven manuscripts survive in some form from ninth-century Carolingian workshops. On this basis, many if not most of the leading technical titles circulating in Latin probably survived, even from late Antiquity.

[Three contracts signed by the apothecary Nicolas Houel in 1586]. / Trois contrats passés avec Nicolas Houel, intendant et gouverneur de la Maison de la charité chrétienne en 1586.

Nicolas Houel famous apothecary founder of the House of the Christian Charity, near Paris, in the 16th Century, welcomed poor children for six years. The author has found two reception contracts and a settlement act to the Foundation signed by Houel in 1586.