BARXACLE GEESE— GOOSE BARNACLES. lot 



Lent. Sir Robert Sibbald * refers to this, and says that 

 Normandy was the locality from which the French capital 

 was reported to be principally supplied ; but that in fact 

 the greater number of these geese came from Holland. 

 The date of this edict is not given. 



Professor Max Miiller says that in Brittany, Barnacle 

 geese are still allowed to be eaten on Fridays, and that the 

 Roman Catholic Bishop of Ferns may give permission to 

 people out of his diocese to eat these birds at his table. 



In Bombay, also, where fish is prohibited as food to some 

 classes of the population, the priests call this goose a " sea- 

 vegetable," under which name it is allowed to be eaten. 



Various localities were mentioned as the breeding-places of 

 these arboreal geese. Gervasius of Tilbury,t writing about 

 I2II, describes the process of their generation in full detail, 

 and says that great numbers of them grew in his time 

 upon the young willow trees which abounded in the 

 neighbourhood of the Abbey of Faversham, in the county 

 of Kent, and within the Archiepiscopate of Canterbury. 

 The bird was there commonly called the Barneta. 



Hector Boethius, or Boece, the old Scottish historian, 

 combats this version of the story. His work, written in 

 Latin, in 1527, was translated into quaint Scottish in 1540, 

 by John Bellenden, Archdeacon of Murray. In his four- 

 teenth chapter, " Of the nature of claik geis, and of the 

 syndry maner of thair procreatioun. And of the ile of 

 Thule," he says : — 



" Restis now to speik of the geis gencrit of the see namit clakis. 

 Sum men bclevis that thir clakis growis on treis be the nebbis. Bot 

 thair opinioun is vane. And becaus the nature and procreatioun of 

 thir clakis is strange we have maid na lytyll laubore and dchgence to 



* Prodrom. Hist. Nat. Scot, parts 2, hb. iii. p. 21, 1684. 

 t Otia Impcrialia, iii. 123. 



