Details Loten's personal history and his professional career as a servant of the Dutch East Indies Company. It contains an inventory of his natural history drawings in the London Natural History Museum and Teylers Museum at Haarlem -- a valuable treasure of eighteenth-century natural history of Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Loten's writings, quoted extensively in this biography, cover early-eighteenth-century narrow-minded, provincial Utrecht in the Dutch Republic, the exotic Dutch East Indies, and cosmopolitan London in the latter part of the century.

Contains reports on archives and on the problems and methods of historical research; summaries of unpublished historical theses produced at the institute; addenda and corrigenda to the Dictionary of national biography, the New English dictionary, and other standard collections; the migrations of historical manuscripts; etc., etc.