Note 7 — An Essay on the Basque Language,

The Basques do not present, in an anthropological point of view, as far as we know at present, any original and well-defined characteristic other than their language.7 Nothing in their manners or customs is peculiar to them. It is in vain that some writers have tried to discover the strange custom of the “couvade” among them, a custom still observed, it is said, by the natives of South America and in the plains of Tartary. It consists in the husband, when his wife is confined, going to bed with the new-born infant, and there he “couve,” “broods over it,” so to say. No modern or contemporaneous writer has found this custom among the Basques; and as to historical testimony, it is reduced to a passage of Strabo—which nothing proves to be applicable to the ancestors of the present Basques—and to certain allusions in writers of the last two centuries. These allusions always refer to the Béarnais, the dialect whence the word “couvade” is borrowed.