It Is Extraordinary That The Caution
Thus Exercised By The Chinese Has Not Prevented Many Of Them From Being
Double-Tongued.
This result, it is supposed, however, will only happen if
the food so raised is eaten in the house in which the future mother
happens to be.
It is thought that the pasting up of the red papers
containing antithetical and felicitous sentences on them, as at New Year's
time, by a man under similar circumstances, and this whether the future
mother sees the action performed or not, will cause the child to have red
marks on the face or any part of the body. The causes producing naevi
materni have probably been the origin of such marks, rather than the idea
entertained by the Chinese that the father, having performed an action by
some occult mode, influences the child yet unborn. A case is said to have
occurred in which ill effects were obviated, or rather obliterated, by the
red papers being torn down, after the birth of the infant, and soaked in
water, when as the red disappeared from the paper, so the child's face
assumed a natural hue. Lord Avebury also speaks of la couvade as
existing among the Chinese of West Yun-Nan. (Origin of Civilisation and
Primitive Condition of Man, p. 18)."
Dr. J.A.H. Murray, editor of the New English Dictionary, wrote, in
The Academy, of 29th October, 1892, a letter with the heading of
Couvade, The Genesis of an Anthropological Term, which elicited an
answer from Dr. E.B. Tylor (Academy, 5th November): "Wanting a general
term for such customs," writes Dr. Tylor, "and finding statements in books
that this male lying-in lasted on till modern times, in the south of
France, and was there called couvade, that is brooding or hatching
(couver), I adopted this word for the set of customs, and it has since
become established in English." The discussion was carried on in The
Academy, 12th and 19th November, 10th and 17th December; Mr. A.L. Mayhew
wrote (12th November): "There is no doubt whatever that Dr. Tylor and
Professor Max Mueller (in a review of Dr. Tylor's book) share the glory of
having given a new technical sense to an old provincial French word, and
of seeing it accepted in France, and safely enshrined in the great
Dictionary of Littre."
Now as to the origin of the word; we have seen above that Rochefort was
the first to use the expression faire la couvade.
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