[231] These Indians adopt a sitting, i.e. continental (not English left lateral) position for parturition.
[232] For similar treatment elsewhere see Schomberg, Reisen in Britisch Guiana, ii. 66.
[233] Hardenburg, p. 135.
[234] I cannot help thinking that some infanticides may be due to the fear by the wife that the husband would refrain from the fulfilment of his debitum conjugale did he find that it resulted in his having to support an unduly increasing family.
[235] Infanticide is a subject open to unlimited misapprehension and misrepresentation. Compare with the above, for instance, the statements of a missionary among some of the Indian tribes farther south. Mr. Grubb speaks of “a shrill cry of pain when a child perhaps has been cruelly murdered” (An Unknown People in an Unknown Land, p. 17). A reviewer with much knowledge and experience of Paraguay, remarks, “I never remember hearing the women’s shrill cry of lamentation. The children are killed almost immediately after birth, as secretly as possible, and no one pays much attention to the fact” (Seymour H. C. Hawtrey, for R.A.I.). This is certainly the case with the Issa and Japura groups.
[236] Among the Ucayali deformed children are killed because they “belong to the devil” (Orton, p. 321).
[237] A similar practice is reported among the Kuni of British New Guinea (Williamson, The Mafulu, p. 178).
[238] Among Zaparo tribes also this is the case (Simson, pp. 175, 183).
[239] Early History of Mankind, p. 247.
[240] This is one of the many supposed indications of a possible Asiatic origin of these peoples, “remnants of a race driven into the mountains by the present dwellers in the plains,” as Tylor says of the Miau-tsze, who also practice the couvade (op. cit. p. 295). The practice is as widespread as the performance of the medicine-man or shaman, though not invariably an accompaniment of so-called shamanism or kindred performances: for example the Arunta have medicine-men but do not practise the couvade, the Basque people have couvade but no medicine-man.