The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Science" concluded that "although some parts are a little tedious, from the amount of minute detail required, there is throughout so much of acute observation and amusing anecdote as to render it perhaps more attractive to general readers than any of Mr. Darwin's previous work". Eric Korn, in the "London Review of Books", describes how the book was claimed, and he argues subverted, by Margaret Mead and her "sympathisers", and then presented afresh by Paul Ekman. Ekman had collected pro-Darwin, anti-Mead evidence, Korn wrote, for the universality of human facial expression of emotions. Darwin, suggests Korn, avoided unsettling the Victorian
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals with livestock breeders and pigeon fanciers; on observations on his infant son William Erasmus Darwin ("A Biographical Sketch of an Infant" - published as a paper in the philosophical journal "Mind"), on his family's dogs and cats, and on the orangutans at London Zoo; on simple psychology experiments with members of his family concerning the recognition of emotional expression; on the neurological insights of Duchenne de Boulogne, a physician at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris; on hundreds of photographs of actors, babies and children; and on descriptions of psychiatric patients in the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield in