292 SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS. 



view, among the lower races, of a mental state hard to trace 

 among tliose high in the scale of civilization. The Couvade im- 

 plicitly denies that physical separation of " individuals," which 

 a civilized man would probably set down as a first principle, 

 common by nature to all mankind, till experience of the psy- 

 chology of the savage showed him that he was mistaking edu- 

 cation for intuition. It shows us a number of distinct and dis- 

 tant tribes deliberately holding the opinion that the connexion 

 between father and child is not only, as we think, a mere rela- 

 tion of parentage, affection, duty, but that their very bodies 

 are joined by a physical bond, so that what is done to the one 

 acts directly upon the other. The couvade is not the only re- 

 sult of the opinion which thus repudiates the physical severance 

 that seems to come so natural to us; and this opinion again 

 belongs, like Sorcery and Divination, to the mental state in 

 which man does not separate the subjective mental connexion 

 from the objective physical connexion, the connexion which is 

 inside his mind from the connexion which is outside it, in the 

 same way in which most educated men of the higher races 

 make this separation. A few more cases will further illus- 

 trate the effects of such a condition of mind. Not only is it 

 held that the actions of the father, and the food that he eats, 

 influence his child both before and after its birth, but that the 

 actions and food of survivors affect the spirits of the dead on 

 their journey to their home in the after life. Among the 

 Land Dayaks of Borneo, the husband, before the birth of his 

 child, may do no work with a sharp instrument except what is 

 necessary for the farm ; nor may he fire guns, nor strike ani- 

 mals, nor do any violent work, lest bad influences should affect 

 the child; and after it is born the father is kept in seclusion 

 indoors for several days, and dieted on rice and salt, to pre- 

 vent not his own but the child's stomach from swelling.^ In 

 Kamchatka, the husband must not do such things as bend 

 sledge-staves across his knee before his child is born, for such 

 actions do harm to his wife.^ In Greenland, beside the strict 



' St. John, vol. i. p. 160. Tr. Eth. Soc, 1863, p. 233. Compare the eight days' 

 fast in Madagascar of the fathers whose children were to be circumcised. Voy. of 

 FranQois Canche, p. 51, in Eel. de Madagascar, etc. ; Paris, 1651. 



= Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 207. Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 351. 



