I20 pPant Isore, Tsege^/, cmel "bijric/. 



Martin assures us that he had seen many of these fowls in the 

 shells, sticking to the trees by the bill, but acknowledges that he 

 had never descried any of them with life upon the tree, though the 

 natives [of the Orkney Isles] had seen them move in the heat 

 of the sun. * 



In the ' Cosmographiae of Albioun,' Boece (to whom we have 

 before referred) considered the nature of the seas acting on old 

 wood more relevant to the creation of barnacle or claik geese than 

 anything else. "For," he says, "all trees that are cassin into the seas, 

 by process of time appears at first worm-eaten, and in the small 

 holes or bores thereof grows small worms. First they show their 

 head and neck, and last of all they show their feet and wings. 

 Finally, when they are come to the just measure and quantity of 

 geese, they fly in the air, as other fowls wont, as was notably 

 proven in the year of God one thousand four hundred and eighty 

 in the sight of many people beside the castle of Pitslego." He then 

 goes on to describe how a tree having been cast up by the sea, and 

 split by saws, was found full of these geese, in different stages of 

 their growth, some being "perfect shapen fowls;" and how the 

 people, " having ylk day this tree in more admiration," at length 

 deposited it in the kirk of St. Andrew's, near Tyre." 



Among the more uninformed of the Scotch peasantry, there 

 still exists a belief that the Soland goose, or gannet, and not the 

 bernicle, grows by the bill on the cliffs of Bass, of Ailsa, and of 

 St. Kilda. 



Giraldus traces the origin of these birds to the gelatinous drops 

 of turpentine which appear on the branches of Fir-trees. 



" A tree that bears oysters is a very extraordinary thing," 

 remarks Bishop Fleetwood in his ' Curiosities of Agriculture and 

 Gardening ' (1707), "but the Dominican Du Tertre, in his Natural 

 History of Antego, assures us that he saw, at Guadaloupa, oysters 

 growing on the branches of trees. These are his very words. The 

 oysters are not larger than the little English oysters, that is to say, 

 about the size of a crown piece. They stick to the branches that 

 hang in the water of a tree called Paretuvier. No doubt the seed of 

 the oysters, which is shed in the tree when they spawn, cleaves to 

 those branches, so that the oysters form themselves there, and grow 

 bigger in process of time, and by their weight bend down the 

 branches into the sea, and then are refreshed twice a day by the 

 flux and reflux of it." 



The Oyster-bearing Tree, however, is not the only marvel of 

 which the good Bishop has left a record : he tells us that near the 

 island Cimbalon there lies another, where grows a tree whose 

 leaves, as they fall off, change into animals : they are no sooner 

 on the ground, than they begin to walk like a hen, upon two little 

 legs. Pigafetta says that he kept one of these leaves eight days in a 

 porringer ; that it took itself to walking as soon as he touched it ; 

 and that it lived only upon the air." Scaliger, speaking of these 



