Among other cognate tribes we find the same thoughts:--
In the Ipurucoto language _imu_ signifies "egg."
In the Bakaïrí language _imu_ signifies "testicles."
In the Tamanako language _imu_ signifies "father."
In the Makusi language _imu_ signifies "semen."
In several dialects _imu-ru_ signifies "child."
Dr. von den Steinen further observes: "Among the Bakaïrí 'child' and 'small' are both _iméri_, 'the child of the chief,' _píma iméri_; we can translate as we please, either 'the child of the chief,' or 'the little chief,' and in the case of the latter form, which we can use more in jest of the son, we are not aware that to the Indian the child is really nothing more than the little chief, the miniature of the big one. Strange and hardly intelligible to us is this idea when it is a girl that is in question. For the girl, too, is 'the little _father_,' and not 'the little _mother_'; it is only the father who has made her. In Bakaïrí there are no special words for 'son' and 'daughter,' but a sex-suffix is added to the word for child when a distinction is necessary; _píma iméri_ may signify either the son or the daughter of the chief. The only daughter of the chief is the inheritrix of possession and rank, both of which pass over with her own possession to the husband." The whole question of the "Couvade" and like practices finds its solution in these words of the author: "The behaviour of the mother, according as she is regarded as more or less suffering, may differ much with the various tribes, while the conduct of the father is practically the same with all She goes about her business, if she feels strong enough, suckles her child, etc. Between the father and the child there is no mysterious correlation; the child is a multiplication of him; the father is duplicated, and in order that no harm may come to the helpless, irrational creature, a miniature of himself, he must demean himself as a child" (536. 338).
The close relationship between father and child appears also in folk-medicine, where children (or often adults) are preserved from, or cured of, certain ailments and diseases by the application of blood drawn from the father.
In Bavaria a popular remedy against cramps consisted in "the father pricking himself in the finger and giving the child in its mouth three drops of blood out of the wound," and at Rackow, in Neu Stettin, to cure epilepsy in little children, "the father gives the child three drops of blood out of the first joint of his ring-finger" (361. 19). In Annam, when a physician cures a small-pox patient, it is thought that the pocks pass over to his children, and among the Dieyerie of South Australia, when a child has met with an accident, "all the relatives are beaten with sticks or boomerangs on the head till the blood flows over their faces. This is believed to lessen the pain of the child" (397. 60, 205).