236 REPTILES AND BIRDS. 
flavour. However, in former times it was much sought after, but not 
exactly for its culinary qualities. The reason this bird was shown such 
preference was because people were permitted to eat itin Lent in place 
of fish. The singular notions on which the Church of Rome founded 
this toleration—a toleration, however, which still exists in full force 
even at the present day—is as follows: The Councils of the twelfth 
century permitted both the clergy and laity to eat this duck during 
Lent, because it was a generally-accepted idea, founded on the writ- 
ings of Aristotle, that these birds were not produced from an egg, but 
had a vegetable origin. The learned of the Middle Ages and the 
Renaissance, seeing large flocks of them suddenly appear, while 
nothing was known whence they came, indulged in all kinds of con- 
jectures to explain this mysterious fact. They attributed to them 
origins which were marvellous; one conjecturing that the feathery 
appearance in the ciliated tentacles of certain molluscs which inhabit 
the barnacle shell changed into Scoters; others imagined that these 
birds were produced from the wood of rotten fir-trees which had been 
long floating about in the sea, or even from the fungi and marine 
mosses which cling to the débris of wrecked ships; others, again, 
went so far as to assert that the north of Scotland, and especially the 
Orkney Isles, produced a tree the fruit of which, falling into the sea, 
developed into the bird which was called Anser arboreus, in order 
to commemorate its origin: this bird they imagined was the Black 
Scoter. 
The naturalists who gave expression to these transcendental 
views might certainly boast that they had Aristotle on their side; 
for this distinguished philosopher believed in the spontaneous gene- 
ration of ‘various kinds of animals. He asserted, for instance, that 
rats sprung from decayed vegetables, and that bees proceeded from 
the carcase of an ox. Who, for instance, is unacquainted with the 
fine episode of the fourth book of Virgil’s “ Georgics,” where this 
poetic fiction is related in beautiful verse ? 
As a matter of fact, however, Pope Innocent II1., better in- 
structed than Aristotle in this department of natural history, passed 
sentence on all these tales by forbidding its use during Lent; but 
no one, either in the monasteries, the castles, or the taverns, has 
ever looked at this interdict of the sovereign pontiff in a serious 
point of view. 
This controverted question, however, at last met with an unex- 
pected solution. Gerard Veer, a Dutch navigator, during one of his 
voyages to the north of Europe, found some eggs of the Velvet Duck. 
Being quite ignorant of their nature, he brought them home, and put 
