book's development: biographical aspects Background: In the weeks before Queen Victoria's coronation in 1838, Charles Darwin sought medical advice on his mysterious physical symptoms, and then travelled to Scotland for a period of rest and a "geologizing expedition" – but actually spent some of his time re-exploring the old haunts of his undergraduate days. On the day of the coronation, 28 June 1838, Darwin was in Edinburgh. Two weeks later (15 July 1838), he opened a private notebook with philosophical and psychological speculation – the M Notebook – and, over the next three months, filled it with his thoughts about possible interactions of hereditary factors with the mental and behavioural aspects of life. It should also be noted that Darwin made his first attempt at autobiography in August 1838. The critical importance of the M Notebook has often been viewed in relation to Darwin's conception of natural selection as the central mechanism of evolutionary development, which he fully grasped towards the end of September 1838, after encountering the sixth edition of Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population (1826). The M notebook has a tentative and fragmented quality, especially in Darwin's descriptions of conversation with his father (a successful doctor with a special interest in psychiatric problems) about recurring patterns of behavior in successive generations of his patients' families. Darwin was anxious about the materialistic drift in his thinking – and of the disrepute which this could attract in early Victorian England – at the time, he was mentally preparing for marriage with his cousin Emma Wedgwood who held firm Christian beliefs. On 21 September 1838, Darwin recorded a confused and disturbing dream in which he was involved in a public execution where the corpse came to life and joked about not running away and facing death like a hero. In summary: Darwin assembled the central features of his evolutionary theory as he was developing an appreciation of human behavior and family life – and he was in some emotional turmoil. A discussion of the significance of Darwin's notebooks can be found in Paul H. Barrett's Metaphysics, Materialism and the Evolution of Mind – Early Writings of Charles Darwin (1980). Development of the Text 1866–1872: Very little of Darwin's turmoil surfaced in On the Origin of Species in 1859, although Chapter 7 contains a mildly expressed argument on instinctive behaviour. In the public management of his evolutionary theory, Darwin understood that its