As I stood by, Barreda offered the Cacique a pinch of Spanish snuff, but seeing the savage refuse it contrary to custom, he thought he must be out of his mind, for he knew him at other times to be greedy of this nasal delicacy; so he asked me aside to inquire the cause of his abstinence. I asked him in the Abiponian tongue (for this Barreda was ignorant of, as the Cacique was of Spanish), why he refused his snuff to-day? 'Don't you know?' he answered, 'that my wife has just been confined? Must not I therefore abstain from stimulating my nostrils? What a danger my sneezing would bring upon my child! 'No more, but he went back to his hut to lie down again directly, lest the tender little infant should take some harm if he stayed any longer with us in the open air. For they believe that the father's carelessness influences the new-born offspring, from a natural bond and sympathy of both. Hence if the child comes to a premature end, its death is attributed by the women to the father's intemperance, this or that cause being assigned; he did not abstain from mead; he had loaded his stomach with water-hog; he had swum across the river when the air was chilly; he had neglected to shave off his long eyebrows; he had devoured underground honey, stamping on the bees with his feet; he had ridden till he was tired and sweated. With raving like this the crowd of women accuse the father with impunity of causing the child's death, and are accustomed to pour curses on the unoffending husband."[1]
We have laid open to us in these accounts a notably distinct view, among the lower races, of a mental state hard to trace among those high in the scale of civilization. The couvade implicitly denies that physical separation of "individuals," which a civilized man would probably set down as a first principle, common by nature to all mankind, till experience of the psychology of the savage showed him that he was mistaking education for intuition. It shows us a number of distinct and distant tribes deliberately holding the opinion that the connexion be-
- ↑ Dobrizhofier, 'Historia de Abiponibus;' Vienna, 1784, vol. ii. p 231, etc. For other South American accounts of the couvade, see Biet, Voy. de la France Equinox., p. 389. Fermin, Descr. de Surinam; Amsterdam, 1769, p. 81. Tschudi, 'Peru,' vol. ii. p. 235. Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1291. Spix & Martius, pp. 1186, 1339. Ploss, 'Das Kind,' vol. i. p. 131
