SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS. 297 



Caribs and Brazilians, even before tbey came under our know- 

 ledge, had advanced too far to allow tbe couvade to grow up 

 fresh among them, they at least practised it with some con- 

 sciousness of its meaning ; it had not fallen out of unison with 

 their mental state. Here, then, we find covering a vast com- 

 pact area of country, the mental stratum, so to speak, to which 

 the couvade most nearly belongs. But if we look at its ap- 

 pearances across from China to Corsica, the state of things is 

 widely different ; no theory of its origin can be drawn from the 

 Asiatic and European accounts to compete for a moment with • 

 that which flows naturally from the observations of the mis- 

 sionaries, who found it not a mere dead custom, but a live 

 growth of savage psychology. The peoples, too, who have 

 kept it up in Asia and Europe seem to have been not the great 

 progressive, spreading, conquering, civilizing nations of the 

 Aryan, Semitic, and Chinese stocks. It cannot be ascribed 

 even to the Tatars, for the Lapps, Finns, and Hungarians 

 appear to know nothing of it. It would seem rather to have 

 belonged to that ruder population, or series of populations, 

 whose fate it has been to be driven by the great races out of 

 their fruitful lands, to take refuge in mountains and deserts. 

 The retainers of the couvade in Asia are the Miau-tsze of China, 

 and the savage Tibareni of Pontus. In Europe, they are the 

 Basque race of the Pyi^enees, whose peculiar manners, appear- 

 ancOj and language, coupled with their geographical position, 

 favour the view that they are the remains of a people driven 

 westward and westward by the pressure of more powerful 

 tribes, till they came to these last mountains with nothing but 

 the Atlantic beyond. Of what stock were the original barba- 

 rian inhabitants of Corsica, we do not know ; but their posi- 

 tion, and the fact that they, too, had the couvade, would sug- 

 gest their having been a branch of the same family, who es- 

 caped their persecutors by putting out to sea, and settling in 

 their mountainous island. 



