296 SOME EEMARKABLE CUSTOMS. 



say tliat the practice is said still to exist in some cantons of 

 Beam, where it is called faire Ja coiivade} Lastly, Diodorus 

 Siculus notices the same habit of the wife being neglected, and 

 the husband put to bed and treated as the patient, among the 

 natives of Corsica about the beginning of the Christian era.^ 



The ethnological value of the four groups of customs now 

 described is not to be weighed with much nicety. The pro- 

 hibitions of marriage among distant kindred go for least in 

 proving connexion by blood or intercourse between the dis- 

 tant races who practise them, as it is easy to suppose them to 

 have grown up again and again from like grounds. But it is 

 hard to suppose that the curiously similar restrictions in the 

 intercourse between parents-in-law and their children-in-law 

 can be of independent growth in each of the remote districts 

 where they prevail, and still more difficult to suppose the 

 quaint trick of the cure by the pretended extraction of objects 

 from the patient's body to have made its appearance indepen- 

 dently in Africa, in America, in Australia, in Europe. In such 

 cases as these there is considerable force in the supposition of 

 there being often, if not always, a historical connexion be- 

 tween their origin in different regions. Thus, the isolated 

 occurrences of a custom among particular races surrounded 

 by other races who ignore it, may be sometimes to the eth- 

 nologist like those outlying patches of strata from which the 

 geologist infers that the formation they belong to once spread 

 over intervening districts, from which it has been removed by 

 denudation; or like the geographical distribution of 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 dif- 

 ferent from that in which it came into being as to make it a 

 mere meaningless, absurd superstition. If the culture of the 



' Legrand d' Aussy, ' Fabliaux du xii« et xiii« Siecle,' 3rd ed. ; Paris, 1829, vol. iii. 

 " Aucaasin et Nicolette." Rocliefort, 1. c. \^Faire la couvade, to sit cowring, or 

 skowking within doors; to lurke in the campe when Gallants are at the BatteU; 

 (any way) to play least in sight (Cotgrare),] 2 Diod. Sic, v. 14. 



