Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. (191 5), No. 10- 129 



It is surely unnecessary to comment at length upon 

 this quibbling, which is a fair sample of the kind of self- 

 destructive criticism one meets in ethnological discussions 

 nowadays. Talking of the " limitation of the range of 

 thought" when out of the unlimited possibilities for its 

 unhampered activities the human mind hit upon four 

 episodes of such a fantastic nature, Keane taxes the 

 credulity of his readers altogether too much when he 

 solemnly tries to persuade them that such ideas are the 

 most natural things in the world for mankind to imagine ! 



Surely it would have been better tactics frankly to 

 admit the identity of origin, and then, following the 

 example of Hough (35), minimize its importance by indi- 

 cating the variety of possible ways by which Asiatic 

 influence may have influenced America sporadically in 

 comparatively recent times. 



But instead of this, Keane insisted upon pushing his 

 refusal to admit the most obvious inferences to the 

 extreme limit and invoked the practice of Couvade as the 

 coup de grace to the. views he was criticizing. But it was 

 singularly unfortunate for his argument that he selected 

 Couvade. His dogmatic assertion that the two peoples 

 he selected are " so widely separated " that they could 

 " never have either directly or indirectly in any way 

 influenced one another" is entirely controverted by the 

 fact that, although Cotivade is, or was, a wide-spread 

 custom, all the places where it occurred are either within 

 the main route of the great " heliolithic culture-wave " or 

 so near as easily to be within its sphere of influence. 

 Thus it is recorded among the Basques, 19 in Africa, India, 

 the Nicobar Islands, Borneo, China, Peru, Mexico, Central 

 California, Brazil and Guiana. Instead of being a " knock- 



19 Recent literature has thrown some doubt upon its occurrence in 

 Western Europe. 



