Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/313

Rh 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 different from that in which it came into being as to make it a mere meaningless, absurd superstition. If the culture of the Caribs and Brazilians, even before they came under our knowledge, had advanced too far to allow the couvade to grow up fresh among them, they at least practised it with some consciousness of its meaning; it had not fallen out of unison with their mental state. Here, then, we find covering a vast compact area of country, the mental stratum, so to speak, to which the couvade most nearly belongs. But if we look at its appearances 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 American missionaries, 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 amalgamated with and shaped by the stronger races, or driven from their fruitful lands to take refuge in mountains and deserts. The retainers of the couvade in Asia are the Miau-tsze of China, the Hiuduized people of Southern India, and the savage Tibareni of Pontus. In Europe, they are the inhabitants of districts near the Pyrenees, a region into which the Basques seem to have been 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 barbarian inhabitants of Corsica, we do not know; but their position, and the fact that they, too, had the couvade, would fit with an idea not unknown to ethnologists, of their having been a branch of the same family, who