For a fuller account of the couvade I must refer my readers to Tylor's "Early History of Mankind", from which I have so largely quoted; his summing up of this curious custom is profound and philosophical. He says: "The isolated occurrences of a custom among particular races, surrounded by other races that 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 from a distant home. The way in which the couvade appears in the new and old worlds is especially interesting from this point of view. Among the savage tribes of South America it is, as it were, at home, in a mental atmosphere, at least, not so different from that in which it came into being as to make it a mere meaningless, absurd superstition. If the culture of the Caribs and Brazilians, even before they came under our knowledge, had advanced too far to allow the couvade to grow up fresh among them, they at least practised it with some consciousness of its meaning; it had not fallen out of unison with their mental state. Here we find, covering a vast compact area of country, the mental stratum, so to speak, to which the couvade most nearly belongs. But if we look at its appearances across from China to Corsica the state of things is widely different; no theory of its origin can be drawn from the Asiatic and European accounts to compete for a moment with that which flows naturally from the observations of the missionaries, who found it not a mere dead custom, but a live growth of savage psychology. The peoples, too, who have kept it up in Asia and Europe seem to have been, not the great progressive, spreading, conquering, civilising nations of the Aryan, Semitic, and Chinese stocks. It cannot be ascribed even to the Tartars, for the Lapps, Finns, and Hungarians appear to know nothing of it. It would seem rather to have belonged to that ruder population, or series of populations, whose fate it has been to be driven by the great races out of the fruitful lands to take refuge in mountains and deserts. The retainers of the couvade in Asia are the Miau-tsze of China and the savage Tibareni of Pontus. In Europe they are the Basque race of the Pyrenees, whose peculiar manners, appearance, and language, coupled with their geographical position, favour the view that they are the remains of a people driven westward and westward, by the pressure of more powerful tribes, till they came to these last mountains, with nothing but the Atlantic beyond. Of what stock were the original barbarian inhabitants of Corsica we do not know; but their position, and the fact that they, too, had the couvade, would suggest their having been a branch of the same family who escaped