The American nations believed in four great primeval ages, as the Hindoo does to this day.

“In the Greeks of Homer,” says Volney, “I find the customs, discourse, and manners of the Iroquois, Delawares, and Miamis.  The tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides paint to me almost literally the sentiments of the red men respecting necessity, fatality, the miseries of human life, and the rigor of blind destiny.” (Volney’s “View of the United States.”)

The Mexicans represent an eclipse of the moon as the moon being devoured by a dragon; and the Hindoos have precisely the same figure; and both nations continued to use this expression long after they had discovered the real meaning of an eclipse.

The Tartars believe that if they cut with an axe near a fire, or stick a knife into a burning stick, or touch the fire with a knife, they will “cut the top off the fire.”  The Sioux Indians will not stick an awl or a needle into a stick of wood on the fire, or chop on it with an axe or a knife.

Cremation was extensively practised in the New World.  The dead were burnt, and their ashes collected and placed in vases and urns, as in Europe.  Wooden statues of the dead were made.

There is a very curious and apparently inexplicable custom, called the “Couvade,” which extends from China to the Mississippi Valley; it demands “that, when a child is born, the father must take to his bed, while the mother attends to all the duties of the household.”  Marco Polo found the custom among the Chinese in the thirteenth century.

The widow tells Hudibras—­

     “Chineses thus are said
     To lie-in in their ladies’ stead.”

The practice remarked by Marco Polo continues to this day among the hill-tribes of China.  “The father of a new-born child, as soon as the mother has become strong enough to leave her couch, gets into bed himself, and there receives the congratulations Of his acquaintances.”  (Max Mueller’s “Chips from a German Workshop,” vol. ii., p. 272.) Strabo (vol. iii., pp. 4, 17) mentions that, among the Iberians of the North of Spain, the women, after the birth of a child, tend their husbands, putting them to bed instead of going themselves.  The same custom existed among the Basques only a few years ago.  “In Biscay,” says M. F. Michel, “the women rise immediately after childbirth and attend to the duties of the household, while the husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbors’ compliments.”  The same custom was found in France, and is said to exist to this day in some cantons of Bearn.  Diodorus Siculus tells us that among the Corsicans the wife was neglected, and the husband put to bed and treated as the patient.  Apollonius Rhodius says that among the Tibereni, at the south of the Black Sea, “when a child was born the father lay groaning, with his head tied up, while the mother tended him with food and prepared his baths.”  The same absurd custom extends throughout the tribes of