Practisers of the Couvade 281 
removed by denudation; or like the geographical distribution 
oi plants, from which the botanist argues that they have 
travelled from a distant home. The way in which the 
couvade appears in the new and old worlds is especially 
interesting from this point of view. Among the savage 
tribes of South America 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 
superstition. 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 with some consciousness of its 
meaning; it had not fallen out of unison with their mental 
state. Here we find, covering a vast compact area of country, 
the mental stratum, so to speak, to which the couvade most 
nearly belongs. But if we look at its appearances across 
from China to Corsica the state of things is widely different; 
no theory of its origin can be drawn from the Asiatic and 
European accounts to compete for a moment with that which 
flows naturally from the observations of the missionaries, 
who found it not a mere dead custom, but a live growth of 
savage psychology. The peoples, too, who have kept it up 
in Asia and Europe seem to have been, not the great pro- 
gressive, spreading, conquering, civilising nations of the 
Aryan, Semitic, and Chinese stocks. It cannot be ascribed 
even to the Tartars, for the Lapps, Finns, and Hungarians 
appear to know nothing of it. It would seem rather to have 
belonged to that ruder population, or series of populations, 
whose fate it has been to be driven by the great races out 
of the fruitful lands to take refuge in mountains and deserts. 
The retainers of the couvade in Asia are the Miau-tsze of 
China and the savage Tibareni of Pontus. In Europe they 
are the Basque race of the Pyrenees, whose peculiar manners, 
appearance, and language, coupled with their geographical 
position, favour the view that they are the remains of a 
people driven westward and westward, by the pressure of 
more powerful tribes, till they came to these last mountains, 
with nothing but the Atlantic beyond. Of what stock were 
the original barbarian inhabitants of Corsica we do not know; 
but their position, and the fact that they, too, had the 
couvade, would suggest their having been a branch of the 
