The Carib races were fully conversant with the valuable properties of these drugs; the native priests or doctors used the dried plants for fumigations and in religious ceremonies; and curiously enough at the present day cascarilla bark is one of the ingredients of incense. An infusion of the leaves was used internally in Carib medicine, and the dried bark was mixed with tobacco and smoked, as is often done in civilized lands. Anacreontic poetry and Bacchic rites were merely intellectual developments of sentiments which the savage feels and expresses in a coarse animal way, just as the alderman’s sense of gratification and perfect contentment after a civic banquet is not altogether different in kind from that felt by a replete quadruped. Alcoholic intoxication must have produced in primitive man visions far surpassing those of his pleasantest dreams, and his brain must have been filled with images, sometimes pleasant, sometimes horrible, of a more pronounced character than those which visited him in sleep. At such times would come some of the visitants from the world of imagination to the mind of primitive man which have had the most important influence on his intellectual development. The drinking customs of our working classes of the present day are in a great degree prompted by the longing which man in every condition has to escape for a while from the squalid, material surroundings of daily life into the ideal world of intellectual pleasures, however low these may often be. “A national love for strong drink,” says a competent authority,[111] “is a characteristic of the nobler and more energetic populations of the world; it accompanies public and private enterprise, constancy of purpose, liberality of thought, and aptitude for war.” Tea, haschish, hops, alcohol, and tobacco stimulate in small doses and narcotise in larger; there have been cases known of tea intoxication.[112] The desire of escaping from self into an ideal world, a world of novelty and pleasures unimaginable, had much to do with the festivals in Greece in honour of Dionysus; it was in some places considered a crime to remain sober at the Dionysia; to be intoxicated on such occasions was to show one’s gratitude for the gift of wine. CHAPTER VIII. CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH PREGNANCY AND CHILD-BEARING. The Couvade, its Prevalence in Savage and Civilized Lands.—Pregnant Women excluded from Kitchens.—The Deities of the Lying-in Chamber. Dr. Tylor[113] gives the following account of the Carib couvade in the West Indies from the work of Du Tertre:[114]—