few words on the Couvade, a custom once prevalent among them, but by no means peculiar to them, as it has been found in Asia, Africa, and America.
Immediately after childbirth the woman rises and goes about the business of the house, whereas the husband at once retires to bed with the baby, receives the congratulations of the neighbours, and is fed on broth and pap during ten days. Strabo mentions this usage above eighteen hundred years ago as prevalent among the Iberians, the ancestors of the Basques. "The women," he says, "after the birth of a child, nurse their husbands, putting them to bed instead of going to it themselves." That this custom was widely spread in the south of France appears from the medieval tale of Aucussin and Nicolette. In it the hero finds King Theodore au lit en couche, whereupon he takes a stick and thrashes him till he vows to abolish the Couvade in his realms. Diodorus Siculus, at the beginning of the Christian era, tells us that this custom also prevailed in Corsica.
Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, met with it in Eastern Asia, so that the widow's remark to Sir Hudibras was not amiss—
"Chineses go to bed
And lie-in in their ladies' stead."
The same custom is found among the American Indians.
What can be its meaning? What topsy-turvydom of the human brain can have originated it? Mr. Tylor, in his Early History of Mankind says that it proceeded from a notion that the woman was a mere machine for the turning out of babies, and that the babes were not in the least supposed to belong to her, but to the father. Also that the child was part and parcel of the father, a feeble and frail parcel, and that the utmost precaution had to be taken to keep the
