John Murray was Charles Darwin's publisher

and his archives have just been opened to the public. The letter in which Darwin proposes his book about natural selection is among them, image here. A great job by the National Library of Scotland. Darwin had other links with Scotland: he studied medicine at Edinburgh University but found the barbarity of 1820s surgery offputting and he decided not to follow his father into the family business. He also made some of his early sampling field trips in Scotland, collecting on the shores of the Firth of Forth and at Prestonpans ten miles north of Edinburgh. He befriended trawler crews and went fishing with them, rummaging through their catches as they were emptied from the nets in search of specimens.