294 SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS. 



lopment in tlie practice of the Tupinambas of Brazil^ wlio would 

 give their own women as wives to their male captives^ and 

 then, without scruple, eat the children when they grew up, 

 holding them simply to be of the flesh and blood of their ene- 

 mies. It is strange that writers who have spoken of the cou- 

 vade during the half-century since Southey wrote, and have 

 even quoted him, should have so neglected the contribution he 

 made to the psychology of the lower races in bringing forward 

 as the source of this remarkable practice at once the Egyptian 

 and American theory of parentage, and the belief in bodily 

 union between father and child.' 



To trace now the geographical distribution of the couvade in 

 other parts of the world. The fasting observed in South Ame- 

 rica and the West Indies seems to extend no further ; repose, 

 careful nui'sing, and nourishing food being the treatment usual 

 for the imaginary invalid. Yenegas mentions this kind of 

 couvade among the Indians of California;^ Zucchelli, in West 

 Africa;^ Captain Van der Hart, in Bouro, in the Eastern Archi- 

 pelago.* The country of Eastern Asia where Marco Polo 

 met with the practice of the couvade in the thirteenth century, 

 appears to be the Chinese province of West Yunnan,^ so that 

 the widow's remark to Sir Hudibras is true in a geographical 

 sense, — 



" For though Chineses go to bed, 

 And lie-in in their ladies' stead." 



But it does not at all follow from this that the couvade was prac- 

 tised among the race ethnologically known to us as the Chinese. 

 The people among whom Marco Polo found it were probably 

 one of the distinct and less cultured races within the vast Chi- 

 nese frontier, for it has been noticed among the mountain tribes 

 known as the Miau-tsze, or " Children of the soil," who differ 

 from the Chinese proper in body, language, and civilization, 

 and are supposed to be, like the Sontals and Gonds of India, 



' Southey, vol. i. pp. 227, 248. Compare Spix and Martius, p. 1339. 

 ' Yenegas, vol. i. p. 94. 3 Zucchelli, p. 165. 



* C. V. der Hart, ' Eeize rondom het eiland Celebes ; ' 'Sgravenhage, 1853, p. 137. 

 ■^ Marco Polo, Latin ed., 1671, lib. ii. c. xh. Marsden's Tr.; London, 1818, 

 p. 434. 



