tween father and child is not only, as we think, a mere relation of parentage, affection, duty, but that their very bodies are joined by a physical bond, so that what is done to the one acts directly upon the other. The couvade is not the only result of the opinion which thus repudiates the physical severance that seems to come so natural to us: and this opinion again belongs, like Sorcery and Divination, to the mental state in which man does not separate the subjective mental connexion from the objective physical connexion, the connexion which is inside his mind from the connexion which is outside it, in the same way in which most educated men of the higher races make this separation. A few more cases will further illustrate the effects of such a condition of mind. Not only is it held that the actions of the father, and the food that he eats, influence his child both before and after its birth, but that the actions and food of survivors affect the spirits of the dead on their journey to their home in the after life. Among the Land Dayaks of Borneo, the husband, before the birth of his child, may do no work with a sharp instrument except what is necessary for the farm; nor may he fire guns, nor strike animals, nor do any violent work, lest bad influences should affect the child; and after it is born the father is kept in seclusion indoors for several days, and dieted on rice and salt, to prevent not his own but the child's stomach from swelling.[1] In Kamchatka, the husband must not do such things as bend sledge staves across his knee before his child is born, for such actions do harm to his wife.[2] In Greenland, not only may a woman after the birth of a child only eat fish and meat taken by her husband, but the husband must for some weeks do no work and follow no occupation, except the procuring of necessary food, and this in order that the child may not die. When a Greenlander dies, his soul starts to travel to the land of Torngarsuk, where reigns perpetual summer, all sunshine and no
- ↑ St. John, vol. i. p. 160. Tr. Eth. Soc., 1863, p. 233. Compare the eight days' fast in Madagascar of the fathers whose children were to be circumcised. Voy. of François Cauche, p. 51, in Rel. de Madagascar, etc.; Paris, 1651. See also Yate, 'New Zealand,' p. 82.
- ↑ Klemm, C. G., vol. ii p. 207. Steller, 'Kamchatka,' p. 351. The Lapp superstition against putting a handle to an axe in the house of a lying-in woman, or tying knots in her garments, is similar. See Leems in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 483.
