Darwinism stated by Darwin himself · Charles Darwin
THE BRAIN ENLARGES AS THE MENTAL FACULTIES DEVELOP.
The gradually increasing weight of the brain and skull in man must have influenced the development of the supporting spinal column, more especially while he was becoming erect. As this change of position was being brought about, the internal pressure of the brain will also have influenced the form of the skull; for many facts show how easily the skull is thus affected. Ethnologists believe that it is modified by the kind of cradle in which infants sleep. Habitual spasms of the muscles and a cicatrix from a severe burn have permanently modified the facial bones. In young persons whose heads have become fixed either sideways or backward, owing to disease, one of the two eyes has changed its position, and the shape of the skull has been altered apparently by the pressure of the brain in a new direction. I have shown that with long-eared rabbits even so trifling a cause as the lopping forward of one ear drags forward almost every bone of the skull on that side; so that the bones on the opposite side no longer strictly correspond.
Lastly, if any animal were to increase or diminish much in general size, without any change in its mental powers, or if the mental powers were to be much increased or diminished, without any great change in the size of the body, the shape of the skull would almost certainly be altered. I infer this from my observations on domestic rabbits, some kinds of which have become very much larger than the wild animal, while others have retained nearly the same size, but in both cases the brain has been much reduced relatively to the size of the body. Now, I was at first much surprised on finding that in all these rabbits the skull had become elongated or dolichocephalic; for instance, of two skulls of nearly equal breadth, the one from a wild rabbit and the other from a large domestic kind, the former was 3·15 and the latter 4·3 inches in length. One of the most marked distinctions in different races of men is that the skull in some is elongated, and in others rounded; and here the explanation suggested by the case of the rabbits may hold good; for Welcker finds that short “men incline more to brachycephaly, and tall men to dolichocephaly”; and tall men may be compared with the larger and longer-bodied rabbits, all of which have elongated skulls, or are dolichocephalic. From these several facts we can understand, to a certain extent, the means by which the great size and more or less rounded form of the skull have been acquired by man; and these are characters eminently distinctive of him in comparison with the lower animals.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.