One might have imagined that such an instance, especially when backed with the authority[18] of our greatest anthropologist, who certainly has no bias in favour of the views I am promulgating, would have carried conviction to the mind of anyone willing to be convinced by precise evidence. But not to Mr. Keane! In endeavouring to whittle down the significance of this crucial case, he incidentally illustrates the lengths of unreason to which this school of ethnologists will push their argument, when driven to formulate a reductio ad absurdum without realizing the magnitude of the absurdity their blind devotion to a catch-word impels them to perpetrate.
In Keane’s “Ethnology” ([41], pp. 217-219) the following passages are found:—
“It is further to be noticed that religious ideas, like social usages, are easily transmitted from tribe to tribe, from race to race. [Most of my critics base their opposition on a denial of these very assumptions!] Hence resemblances in this order, where they arise, must rank very low as ethnical tests. If not the product of a common cerebral structure, they can prove little beyond social contact in remote or later times. A case in point is [Tylor’s statement, which I have just quoted].
“The parallelism is complete; but the range of thought is extremely limited—nothing but mountains and knives, beside the river of death common to Egyptians, Greeks, and all peoples endowed with a little imagination.” “Hence Prof. E. B. Tylor, who calls attention to the points of resemblance, builds far too much on them when he adduces them as convincing evidence of pre-Columbian culture in America taking shape under Asiatic influences. In the same place he refers to Humboldt’s argument based on the similarity of calendars and of mythical catastrophes. But the ‘mythical catastrophes,’ floods and the like, have long been discounted, while the Mexican calendar, despite the authority of Humboldt’s name, presents no resemblance whatsoever to those of the ‘Tibetan and Tartar tribes,’ or to any other of the Asiatic calendars with which it has been compared. ‘There is absolutely no similarity between the Tibetan calendar and the primitive form of the American,’ which, ‘was not intended as a year-count, but as a ritual and formulary,’ and whose signs ‘had nothing to do with the signs of the zodiac, as had all those of the Tibetan and Tartar calendars’ (D. G. Brinton, ‘On various supposed Relations between the American and Asian races,’ from Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology, Chicago, p. 148). Regarding all such analogies as may exist ‘between the culture and customs of Mexico and those of China, Cambodia, Assyria, Chaldæa, and Asia Minor,’ Dr. Brinton asks pertinently, ‘Are we, therefore, to transport all these ancient peoples, or representatives of them, into Mexico?’ (ib. p, 147). So Lefevre, who regards as ‘quite chimerical’ the attempts made to trace such resemblances to the Old World. ‘If there are coincidences, they are fortuitous, or they result from evolution, which leads all the human group through the same stages and by the same steps’ (‘Race and Language,’ p. 185).
“Many far more inexplicable coincidencies than any of those here referred to occur in different regions, where not even contact can be suspected. Such is the strange custom of Couvade, which is found to prevail among peoples so widely separated as the Basques and Guiana Indians, who could never have either directly or indirectly in any way influenced each other” ([34]).
It is surely unnecessary to comment at length upon this quibbling, which is a fair sample of the kind of self-destructive criticism one meets in ethnological discussions nowadays. Talking of the “limitation of the range of thought” when out of the unlimited possibilities for its unhampered activities the human mind hit upon four episodes of such a fantastic nature, Keane taxes the credulity of his readers altogether too much when he solemnly tries to persuade them that such ideas are the most natural things in the world for mankind to imagine!
Surely it would have been better tactics frankly to admit the identity of origin, and then, following the example of Hough ([35]), minimize its importance by indicating the variety of possible ways by which Asiatic influence may have influenced America sporadically in comparatively recent times.
But instead of this, Keane insisted upon pushing his refusal to admit the most obvious inferences to the extreme limit and invoked the practice of Couvade as the coup de grâce to the views he was criticizing. But it was singularly unfortunate for his argument that he selected Couvade. His dogmatic assertion that the two peoples he selected are “so widely separated” that they could “never have either directly or indirectly in any way influenced one another” is entirely controverted by the fact that, although Couvade is, or was, a widespread custom, all the places where it occurred are either within the main route of the great “heliolithic culture-wave” or so near as easily to be within its sphere of influence. Thus it is recorded among the Basques,[19] in Africa, India, the Nicobar Islands, Borneo, China, Peru, Mexico, Central California, Brazil and Guiana. Instead of being a “knockout blow” to the view I am maintaining, the geographical distribution of this singularly ludicrous practice is a very welcome addition to the list of peculiar baggage which the “heliolithic” traveller carried with him in his wanderings, and a striking confirmation of the fact that in the spread from its centre of origin this custom must have travelled along the same route as the other practices we are examining.
After the artificialities of Keane and Fewkes, it is a satisfaction to turn back to the writings of the old ethnologists who lived in the days before the so-called “psychological” and “evolutionary explanations” were invented, and were content to accept the obvious interpretation of the known facts.