58 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN 



related to his Tartar acquaintances, viz., that of the 

 " Barnacle Geese," which has never been surpassed as a 

 specimen of ignorant credulity and persistent error. 



'From the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury it was implicitly and almost universally believed that 

 in the western islands of Scotland certain geese, of which 

 the nesting-places were never found, instead of being 

 hatched from eggs, like other birds, were bred from 

 " shell-fish " which grew on trees. Upon the shores 

 where these geese abounded, pieces of timber and old 

 trunks of trees covered with barnacles were often seen, 

 which had been stranded by the sea. From between the 

 partly opened shells of the barnacles protruded their 

 plumose cirrhi, which in some degree resemble the 

 feathers of a bird. Hence arose the belief that they con- 

 tained real birds. The fishermen persuaded themselves 

 that these birds within the shells were the geese whose 

 origin they had been previously unable to discover, and 

 that they were thus bred, instead of being hatched, like 

 other birds, from eggs.' Mr. Lee states that the old 

 botanist Gerarde had, in 1597, the audacity to assert that 

 he had witnessed the transformation of the shell-fish into 

 geese. What Gerarde states, as I read it, is that some- 

 thing like a bird fell out of the shell into the sea, ' where 

 it gathereth feathers, and groweth to a fowle bigger than 

 a mallard and lesser than a goose.' He distinctly says 

 that if it fell on the ground it died. 



The drawing of the plants throughout Gerarde 's book 

 is more delicate and finished than in Parkinson's. 



1691. I have a little gardener's almanack of this date. 

 My copy is the '8th edition, and has many useful 

 additions.' This book is without illustrations except 

 for a frontispiece of a young man and young woman 

 admiring a garden through a doorway. The woman is 

 attended by a page, who is holding a modern-looking sun- 



