The Descent of Man

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, whilst 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