DARWIN, Charles.
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The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. First edition, first issue, "written as a confutation of the idea that the facial muscles of expression in man were a special endowment" (Freeman). The plates are among the earliest commercially reproduced photographs in a scientific book. While researching this work, Darwin invited the photographer Oscar Rejlander to make comparative studies of laughter and crying, obtained photographs of asylum inmates from the asylum director James Crichton-Browne, and consulted the French physiologist Guillaume Duchenne on his electrical research on facial muscles.In the first issue, "that" is spelled correctly on the first line of page 208. The plates are lettered with Roman numerals; another state is known in Arabic numerals, without priority of issue. Freeman suggests that the Arabic numeral plates were printed first but notes that "the two states seem to occur at random in the two issues of the text, and Darwin's own copy, at Cambridge, has the Roman" (Freeman).
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