FABLE AND FOLKLORE 65 



where in the Middle Ages, for Max Miiller quotes a car- 

 dinal of the nth century who represented the goslings 

 as bursting, fully fledged, from fruit resembling apples. 

 A century later (1187) Giraldus Cambrensis, an arch- 

 deacon reproving laxity among the priests in Ireland, con- 

 demns the practice of eating barnacle geese in Lent on 

 the plea that they are fish; and soon afterward Innocent 

 III forbade it by decree. Queer variants soon appeared. 

 A legend relating to Ireland inscribed on a Genoese 

 world-map, and described by Dr. Edward L. Stevenson 

 in a publication of The Hispanic Society (New York) 

 reads: "Certain of their trees bear fruit which, decaying 

 within, produces a worm which, as it subsequently de- 

 velops, becomes hairy and feathered, and, provided 

 wings, flies like a bird." 



An extensive clerical literature grew up in Europe in 

 discussion of the ethics of this matter, for the monks 

 liked good eating and their Lenten fare was miserably 

 scanty, and a great variety of explanations of the alleged 

 marine birth of these birds — ordinary geese (Branta 

 bernicla) when mature — were contrived. That some- 

 thing of the kind was true nobody in authority denied 

 down to the middle of the 17th century, when a German 

 Jesuit, Gaspar Schott, was bold enough to declare that 

 although the birth-place of this uncommon species of 

 goose was unknown (it is now believed to breed in 

 Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla), undoubtedly it was pro- 

 duced from incubated eggs like any other goose. Never- 

 theless the fable was reaffirmed in the Philosophical 

 Transactions of the Scottish Royal Society for 1677. 

 Henry Lee 38 recalls two versions of the absurd but preva- 

 lent theory. One is that certain trees, resembling willows, 

 and growing always close to the sea, produced at the ends 



