SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS. 295 



remnants of a race driven into the mountains by tlie present 

 dwellers in the plains. A Chinese traveller among the Miau- 

 tsze, giving an account of their manners and customs, notices, 

 as though the idea were quite strange to him, that " In one 

 tribe it is the custom for the father of a new-born child, as 

 soon as its mother has become strong enough to leave her 

 couch, to get into bed himself, and there receive the congra- 

 tulations of his acquaintances, as he exhibits his offspring.^ 

 Another Asiatic people recorded to have practised the cou- 

 vade 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 eighteen 

 hundred 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 existence of the practice among the modern Basques. 

 " In Biscay," says Michel, " in valUes whose population recalls 

 in its usages the infancy of society, the women rise immediately 

 after child-birth, and attend to the duties of the houseliold, 

 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 fabliau the 

 King of Torelore 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. And the same author goes on to 



' W. Lockhart, in Tr. Eth. Soc. 1861, p. 181. ^Eochefort (p. 550) sets down 

 the Japanese as practising the couvade; and the same bare mention appears in 

 later writers, who, perhaps, merely followed him. Is his statement based on 

 proper evidence, or simply a mistake ? 



2 Apoll. Ehod. Argonautica, ii. 1009. C. Val. Flacc. Argon., v. 148. 



3 Strabo, iii. 4, 17. 



* Michel, ' Le Pays Basque ; ' Paris, 1857, p. 201. A. de Quatrefages, in Eer 

 des Deux Mondes, 1850, vol. v. 



5 Laborde, 'Itineraire de I'Espagnej' Paris, 1834, vol. i. p. 273. 



