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The couvade is a curious custom by which, when a mother gives birth to a child, the father goes to bed and is waited upon. It is practised in South America, in Greenland, Kamskatka, West Yunnan, Borneo, in the North of Spain, in Corsica, and in the South of France. Mr. Octavius March wrote to Mr. Darwin in 1875, asking him whether, in connection with the fact that male mammals possess mammæ, he thought it possible that the couvade had its origin in an early habit of the male sex to take part in the nourishment of the offspring. Mr. Darwin replied as follows. "The couvade has always seemed to me the most extraordinary of all the odd customs followed by man. Your idea is new to me, and very ingenious; but I do not think that it can be admitted, as the period when male mammals suckled their young must have been so immensely remote, seeing that rudimentary mammæ are common to all orders, including the marsupials."

Neither correspondent seems to have known that in some African villages, as attested by Livingstone and other travellers, elderly men with well-developed mammæ are employed as wet nurses in suckling the young.