280 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
noticed in West Africa, and ‘‘ amongst the mountain tribes 
known as the Miau-tsze, who are supposed to be, like the 
Sontals and Gonds of India, remnants of a race driven into 
the mountains by the present dwellers of the plains.” 
“Another Asiatic people, recorded to have practised the 
couvade, are the Tibareni of Pontus, at the south of the 
Black Sea, among whom, when the child was born, the father 
lay groaning in bed with his head tied up, while the mother 
tended him with food and prepared his baths.”” In Europe 
the couvade may be traced up from ancient into modern 
times in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees. Above 1800 
years ago Strabo mentions the story that, among the Iberians 
of the north of Spain, the women, after the birth of a child, 
tend their husbands, putting them to bed instead of going 
themselves; and this account is confirmed by the evidence 
of the practice amongst the modern Basques. In Biscay, 
says Michel, ‘in valleys whose population recalls in its 
usages the infancy of society, the women rise immediately 
after childbirth and attend to the duties of the household, 
while the husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, 
and thus receives the neighbours’ compliments.” “It has 
been found also in Navarre, and on the French side of the 
Pyrenees. Legrand d’Aussy mentions that in an old French 
fable the king of Torelose is ‘au lit et en couche’ when 
Aucassin arrives and takes a stick to him and makes him 
promise to abolish the custom in his realm. The same 
author goes on to state that the practice is said still to exist 
in some cantons of Béarn, 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: ‘‘ 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 formation they belong to 
once spread over intervening districts, from which it has been 
