“En Amerique, en Corse, et chez l’Iberien,
  En France meme encor chez le Venarnien,
  Au pays Navarrois, lorsqu’une femme accouche,
  L’epouse sort du lit et le mari se couche;
  Et, quoiqu’il soit tres sain et d’esprit et de corps,
  Contre un mal qu’il n’a point l’art unit ses efforts. 
  On le met au regime, et notre faux malade,
  Soigne par l’accouchee, en son lit fait couvade: 
  On ferme avec grand soin portes, volets, rideaux;
  Immobile, on l’oblige a rester sur le dos,
  Pour etouffer son lait, qui gene dans sa course,
  Pourrait en l’etouffant remonter vers sa source. 
  Un mari, dans sa couche, au medecin soumis,
  Recoit, en cet etat, parents, voisins, amis,
  Qui viennent l’exhorter a prendre patience
  Et font des voeux au ciel pour sa convalescence.”

Professor Vinson, who is an authority on the subject, comes to the conclusion that it is not possible to ascribe to the Basques the custom of the couvade.

Mr. Tylor writes to me that he “did not quite begin the use of this good French word in the sense of the ‘man-child-bed’ as they call it in Germany.  It occurs in Rochefort, Iles Antilles, and though Dr. Murray, of the English Dictionary, maintains that it is spurious, if so, it is better than any genuine word I know of.”—­H.C.] “In certain valleys of Biscay,” says Francisque-Michel, “in which the popular usages carry us back to the infancy of society, the woman immediately after her delivery gets up and attends to the cares of the household, whilst the husband takes to bed with the tender fledgeling in his arms, and so receives the compliments of his neighbours.”

The nearest people to the Zardandan of whom I find this custom elsewhere recorded, is one called Langszi,[2] a small tribe of aborigines in the department of Wei-ning, in Kweichau, but close to the border of Yun-nan:  “Their manners and customs are very extraordinary.  For example, when the wife has given birth to a child, the husband remains in the house and holds it in his arms for a whole month, not once going out of doors.  The wife in the mean time does all the work in doors and out, and provides and serves up both food and drink for the husband, she only giving suck to the child.”  I am informed also that, among the Miris on the Upper Assam border, the husband on such occasions confines himself strictly to the house for forty days after the event.

The custom of the Couvade has especially and widely prevailed in South America, not only among the Carib races of Guiana, of the Spanish Main, and (where still surviving) of the West Indies, but among many tribes of Brazil and its borders from the Amazons to the Plate, and among the Abipones of Paraguay; it also exists or has existed among the aborigines of California, in West Africa, in Bouro, one of the Moluccas, and among a wandering tribe of the Telugu-speaking districts of Southern India.  According to Diodorus it prevailed