other parts of the world. The fasting observed in South America and the West Indies is not general; repose, careful nursing, and nourishing food being the treatment usual for the imaginary invalid. Venegas mentions this kind of couvade anong the Indians of California;[1] Zucchelli, in West Africa;[2] Captain Van der Hart, in Bouro, in the Eastern Archipelago.[3] The country of Eastern Asia where Marco Polo met with the practice of the couvade in the thirteenth century, appears to be the Chinese province of West Yunnan,[4] so that the widow's remark to Sir Hudibras is true in a geographical sense,—
"For though Chineses go to bed,
And lie-in in their ladies' stead."
But it does not at all follow from this that the couvade was practised among the race ethnologic ally known to us as the Chinese. The people among whom Marco Polo found it were probably one of the distinct and less cultured races within the vast Chinese frontier, for it has been noticed among the mountain tribes known as the Miau-tsze, or "Children of the soil," who differ from the Chinese proper in body, language, and civilization, and are supposed to be, like the Sontals and Gonds of India, remnants of a race driven into the mountains by the present dwellers in the plains. A Chinese traveller among the Miau-tsze, giving an account of their manners and customs, notices, as though the idea were quite strange to him, that "In one tribe it is the custom for the father of a new-born child, as soon as its mother has become strong enough to leave her couch, to get into bed himself, and there receive the congratulations of his acquaintances, as he exhibits his offspring."[5] To the districts mentioned in
- ↑ Venegas, vol. i. p. 94; Bancroft, 'Native Races of Pacific States,' vol. i. pp. 391, 585.
- ↑ Zucchelli, p. 165.
- ↑ C. v. der Hart, 'Reize rondom het eiland Celebes;' 'Sgravenhage, 1S53, p. 137.
- ↑ Marco Polo, Latin ed., 1671, lib. ii. c. xli. Marsden's Tr.; London, 1813, p. 434.
- ↑ W. Lockhart, in Tr. Eth. Soc. 1861, p. 181. Rochefort (p. 550) sets down the Japanese as practising the couvade; and the same bare mention appears in later writers, who, perhaps, merely followed him. Is his statement based on proper evidence, or simply a mistake?
