pliments." It has been found also in Navarre,[1] and on the French side of the Pyrenees. Legrand d'Aussy mentions that in an old French fabliau the King of Torelore is "au lit et en couche " when Aucassin arrives and takes a stick to him, and makes him promise to abolish the custom in his realm. And the same author goes on to say that the practice is said still to exist in some cantons of Béarn, where it is called faire la couvade.[2] Lastly, Diodorus Siculus notices the same habit of the wife being neglected, and the husband put to bed and treated as the patient, among the natives of Corsica about the beginning of the Christian era.[3]
The ethnological value of the four groups of customs now described is not to be weighed with much nicety. The prohibitions of marriage among distant kindred go for least in proving connexion by blood or intercourse between the distant races who practise them, as it is easy to suppose them to have grown up again and again from like grounds. But it is hard to suppose that the curiously similar restrictions in the intercourse between parents-in-law and their children-in-law can be of independent growth in each of the remote districts where they prevail, and still more difficult to suppose the quaint trick of the cure by the pretended extraction of objects from the patient's body to have made its appearance independently in Africa, in America, in Australia, in Europe. In such cases as these there is considerable force in the supposition of there being often a historical connexion between their origin in different regions. Thus, the isolated occurrences of a custom among particular races surrounded by other races who ignore it, may be sometimes to the ethnologist like those outlying patches of strata from which the geologist infers that the formation they belong to once spread over intervening districts, from which it has been removed by denudation; or like the geographical distribution of plants, from which the botanist argues that they have travelled
- ↑ Laborde, 'Itinéraire de l'Espagne;' Paris, 1834, vol. i. p. 273.
- ↑ Legrand d'Aussy, 'Fabliaux du XIIe et XIIIe Siècle,' 3rd ed.; Paris, 1829, vol. iii. "Aucassin et Nicolelte." Rochefort, l. c. [Faire la couvade, to sit cowring, or skowking within doors; to lurke in the campe when Gallants are at the Battell; (any way) to play least in sight (Cotgrave).]
- ↑ Diod. Sic. v. 14.
