288 SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS. 



tices has an existing European name, the couvade, or " hatch- 

 ing/' and this term it may be convenient to use for the whole 

 set. By working up the old information with the aid of some 

 new facts, I have endeavoured to give an account, not only of 

 the geographical distribution of the couvade, but of its na- 

 ture and meaning. The most convenient way of discussing 

 it is first to examine the forms it takes in South America and 

 the West Indies, the district where it is not only developed to 

 the highest degree, but is also practised with a clear notion of 

 ^vhat it means ; and afterwards to trace its more scattered and 

 obscure appearances in other quarters of the world. 



The following account is given by Du Tertre of the Carib 

 couvade in the West Indies. When a child is born, the mother 

 goes presently to her work, but the father begins to complain, 

 and takes to his hammock, and there he is visited as though 

 he were sick, and undergoes a course of dieting which would 

 cure of the gout '''' the most replete of Frenchmen. How they 

 can fast so much and not die of it," continues the narrator, 

 " is amazing to me, for they sometimes pass the five first days 

 without eating or drinking anything ; then up to the tenth 

 -they drink oiiycou, which has about as much nourishment in it 

 as beer. These ten days passed, they begin to eat cassava only, 

 drinking oiiycou, and abstaining from everything else for the 

 space of a whole month. During this time, however, they 

 only eat the inside of the cassava, so that what is left is like 

 the rim of a hat when the block has been taken out, and all 

 these cassava rims they keep for the feast at the end of forty 

 days, hanging them up in the house with a cord. When the 

 forty days are up they invite their relations and best friends, 

 who being arrived, before they set to eating, hack the skin of 

 this poor wretch with agouti-teeth, and draw blood from all 

 parts of his body, in such sort that from being sick by pure 

 imagination they often make a real patient of him. This is, 

 however, so' to speak, only the fish, for now comes the sauce 

 they prepare for him ; they take sixty or eighty large grains 

 of pimento or Indian pepper, the strongest they can get, and 

 after well mashing it in water, they wash with this peppery 

 infusion the wounds and scars of the poor fellow, who I be- 



