Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/307

Rh night, where there is good water, and birds, fish, seals, and reindeer without end, that are to be caught without trouble, or are found cooking alive in a huge kettle. But the journey to this blessed land is difficult, the souls have to slide five days or more down a precipice all stained with the blood of those who have gone down before. And it is especially grievous for the poor souls when the journey must be made in winter or in tempest, for then a soul may come to harm, and suffer the other death, as they call it, when it perishes utterly, and nothing is left. And this is to them the most wretched fate; and therefore the survivors, for these five days or more, must abstain from certain food, and all noisy work except their necessary fishing, that the soul on its dangerous journey may not be disturbed or come to harm. But perhaps no story on record so clearly shows how deeply the idea of these imaginary ties is rooted in the savage mind, as one told by Mr. Wallace in his South American tour:— "An Indian, who was one of my hunters, caught a fine cock of the rock, and gave it to his wife to feed; but the poor woman was obliged to live herself on cassava-bread and fruits, and abstain entirely from all animal food, pepper, and salt, which it was believed would cause the bird to die." The bird died after all, and the woman was beaten by her husband for having killed it by some violation of the rule of abstinence.

An attempt to account for the couvade has been made by Bachofen, in his remarkable treatise on that early stage of society when the rule of kinship on the mother's side prevailed, which in the course of ages has been generally superseded by the opposite rule of kinship on the father's side. The couvade, in his view, belonged to the period of this great social change, being a symbolic act performed by the father for the purpose of taking on himself the parental relation to the child which had been previously held by the mother. If, however, we look closely at the details of the practice among American tribes, who seem to have it near the original state, we shall hardly find them fit with such a theory. Cases like that of the Greenlanders, where both