Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/337

 which the meaning is lost. It is, however, complete enough; the husband goes to bed, utters groans and cries, and his neighbours hasten to his side. And lastly, M. Léon Donnat told me lately that he had discovered the couvade still practised in the little island of Marken, in the Zuydersee.

However strange it may be, a custom that is thus widely spread in countries, races, and epochs extremely diverse must have had a serious raison d'être. It cannot be attributed to mere caprice.

Now the only plausible explanation is that which gives to the couvade the value of our registry of birth. Not, perhaps, all over the world, but here and there, at the moment when the effort was being made to found the paternal family, or at least to determine masculine filiation, some very simple-minded tribes conceived the idea of symbolising the share of the man in procreation by the gross mimicry of childbirth. By this practice, so well calculated to strike the attention, the father openly affirmed his paternity, and doubtless acquired certain rights over the new-born child. Let us note that the custom has been especially preserved among the American Indians, that is to say, in a country where the system of the maternal family has been, and still is, widely spread. The couvade probably represents an effort to emerge from it. It shows that the man will no longer share his wife or wives, that he claims to have children which are certainly his own, and who will doubtless inherit his possessions. It is, in short, a revolt of individualism against primitive communism. The mimicry is gross and strange, but in a social condition where there exists neither lawyer, nor mayor, nor register of civil acts, testimonial proof is the great resource, and, in order to make it sure and durable, men have willingly had recourse to striking and complicated practices which are calculated to engrave the remembrance of a fact on the memory of those present.

The procedure of primitive Rome offers us many examples of the same kind; and notably in the formalities of emancipation, when the Roman father made, three times in succession, a simulation of selling his son.