368 THE NATURALIST IN NICARAGUA. [Ch. XX, 



mentions that in an old French fable the king of Tore- 

 lose is ' au lit et en couche ' when Aucassin arrives and 

 takes a stick to him and makes him promise the custom 

 in his realm. The same author goes on to say that the 

 practice is said still to exist in some cantons of Beam, 

 where it is called ' faire la couvade/ Lastly, Diodorus 

 Siculus notices the same habit of the wife being neglected, 

 and the husband put to bed and treated as the patient 

 among the natives of Corsica about the beginning of the 

 Christian era." 



For a fuller account of the couvade I must refer my 

 readers to Tylor's "Early History of Mankind/' from 

 which I have so largely quoted ; his summing up of this 

 curious custom is profound and philosophical. He says, 

 tl the isolated occurrences of a custom among particular 

 races, surrounded by other races that ignore it, may be 

 sometimes to the ethnologist like those outlying patches 

 of strata from which the geologist infers that the forma- 

 tion they belong to once spread over intervening districts, 

 from which it has been removed by denudation ; or like 

 the geographical distribution of plants, from which the 

 botanist argues that they have travelled from a distant 

 home. The way in which the couvade appears in the 

 iieAV and old worlds is especially interesting from this 

 point of view. Among the savage tribes of South Ame- 

 rica it is, as it were, at home, in a mental atmosphere, 

 at least, not so different from that in which it came into 

 being as to make it a mere meaningless, absurd super- 

 stition. If the culture of the Caribs and Brazilians, even 

 before they came under our knowledge, had advanced too 

 far to allow the couvade to grow up fresh among them, 

 they at least practised it wdth some consciousness of its 



