November 1, 1889.1 



KNOWLEDGE 



11 



the eye-piece and of the great Lick 36-iiich refractor. As 

 in the case of Galileo and Dollond, it is the man who 

 makes use of the idea or the tool at his eonmuind who 

 makes the greatest pi'ogress, and leaves the greatest legacy 

 to mankind. 



We owe the pictures of the Lick ()bser\atory with 

 which this article is illustrated to Mr. Bamham, who is 

 now on his way to Trinidad to observe the eclipse of the 

 sun. 



BARNACLES. 



By S. Hey^vood Bevillk. 



A!\ION(iST the curious myths which in the middle 

 ages did duty for natural science, one of the 

 longest-lived, and yet one of the most extraordi- 

 nary, was that which not only conceived the 

 common shell-fish the barnacle to be the fruit of 

 a tree, but went on to allege its transformation into the sea- 

 bird known as the barnacle goose. The successive changes 

 from fruit to fish, and from fish to fowl, which the myth 

 involved, proved no obstacle to its wide acceptance and 

 long-continued credence. It was w'idely current before the 

 end of the twelfth century. Giraldus Cambrensis, writmg 

 in the reign of Henry II., gives in his Tojiof/nijihia 

 Hiheniiff, a detailed accoimt of it. " There are in this 

 place," says he in one passage, " many birds wliich are 

 called Barnacles ; against nature, nature produces them in 

 a most extraordinary way. They are produced from fir 

 timber, tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum. 

 Afterwards, they hang down by their beaks as if from a 

 sea-weed attached to the timber, surrounded by shells in 

 order to grow more freely. Having thus, in process of 

 time, been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they 

 either fall into the water or fly freely aw'ay into the air. 

 They derive their food and growth from the sap of the 

 weed or the sea by a secret and most wonderful process of 

 alimentation. I have frequently with my own eyes seen 

 more than a thousand of these same bodies of birds hang- 

 ing down on the seashore from one piece of timber, enclosed 

 in shells and already formed. They do not breed and lay 

 eggs like other birds, nor do they ever hatch any eggs, nor 

 do they seem to build nests in any corner of the earth." 

 After this account (liraldus proceeds to inveigh against the 

 custom, which prevailed in some parts of Ireland, of eating 

 the barnacle geese durmg Lent— a custom which was 

 justified by those who followed it by the argument that the 

 geese were " not flesh nor born of flesh," and which 

 affords striking proof of the credence accorded to the 

 story. 



Though contradicted from time to time by some of the 

 bolder writers and observers, the fable kept a strong hold 

 on the poi)ular mind, and even the educated were not 

 ashamed to avow their belief in it. Sir .John Mamulevile 

 alludes to it in his 'I'nnrl.s, w^here he speaks of the " trees 

 that bear a fruit that becomes flying birds." Sir .John 

 somewhat naively adds that the people "towards Upper 

 India," to whom he recounted the story, "had thereof 

 great marvel that some of them thought it was an impos- 

 sibility." The Trairlx appeared about IMTO, and more 

 than two centuries later the subject was treated with 

 considerable fulness and in the most obvious good faith 

 by .lohn Cierarde. who. in his IIiiIkiI, published in 1597, 

 devotes to it a chapter entitled " Of the (loose-tree, 

 Barnakle-tree, or the tree bearing Geese," in which, after 

 nairaling the current belief as to the barnacle geese being 

 produced in the North ot Scotland from shell-fish growing 



on trees, he proceeds to pledge his own credit as to the 

 main facts of the story. Clearly, the myth was current 

 in Shakespeare's time, and, although in an edition of 

 the Herbal, published in 1G36, the editor added a note 

 of caution to the reader at the foot of the chapter, 

 yet eighty years after Gerarde wrote, a scientific writer 

 was to be foimd, who, writmg for scientific readers, 

 asserted, of his own knowledge, the existence of the birds 

 within the shells. This w-as Sir Robert Moray, who 

 describes himself as " lately one of His Majesty's coimcil 

 for the Kingdom of Scotland," and who contributed to the 

 I'hildxtijihicdl 'J'ransditions of 1677-78 a paper entitled " A 

 Relation Concerning Barnacles," from which the follow- 

 ing passages are transacted: — "Being in the Island of 

 East, 1 saw lying upon the shore a cut of a large fir-tree, 

 of about 2i foot diameter and 9 or 10 foot long, w'hich had 

 lain so long out of the water that it was very dry ; and 

 most of the shells that had formerly covered it were worn 

 or rubbed ofl'. Only on the parts that lay next the groimd 

 there still himg multitudes of little shells, having within 

 them little birds perfectly shaped. . . . The sheUs hang 

 on the tree by a neck longer than the shell ; of a kind of 

 filmy substance, round and hollow, and creased, not 

 milike the windpipe of a chicken, spreading out broadest 

 where it is fastened to the tree, fi'om which it seems to 

 draw and convey the matter which serves for the growth 

 and vegetation of the shell, and the little bird within 

 it. . . . This bird in every shell that I opened, as well the 

 least as the biggest, I found so curiously and completely 

 formed that there appeared nothing wanting as to the 

 internal parts for making up a perfect sea-fowl ; every little 

 part appearing so distmctly that the whole looked like a 

 large bird seen through a concave or diminishing glass, 

 colour and feature being everywhere so clear and neat. 

 The little bill like that of a goose, the eyes marked, the 

 head, neck, breast, wings, tail, and feet formed, the 

 feathers everywhere perfectly shaped and blackish coloured, 

 and the feet like those of other water-fowl to my best 

 remembrance." 



Such was the old belief existing during five centuries at 

 any rate, and probably accepted at periods both earlier and 

 later than those from which the preceding examples are 

 taken. To modern observers it seems utterly absm-d. 

 Science has shown its absolute groundlessness as natural 

 history, and Professor Max Miillor, to complete the rout, 

 has put forward in his " Lectures on the Science of Lan- 

 guage," a very interesting theory of its probable origin from 

 the point of view of philology. But the latest researches 

 have shown tliat the barnacle has been deposed from his 

 place in a mythical metamorphosis only to take part in his 

 life-history as now ascertained in another transformation 

 scene quite as wonderful, and this time vouched by the 

 careful observations of our best naturalists. 



In the adult state the barnacle consists of a shell-fish 

 permanently attached by a fleshy peduncle or stalk to a 

 piece of timber or rock or some other object in the sea. 

 The shell opens by a peculiar valve-like arrangement, and, 

 through the aperture thus formed, several pairs of long, 

 immy-jointed "cirri" or feelers are put forth, which, by 

 their constant waving motion, whirl to the creature's 

 mouth the small particles which form its food. Huxley's 

 description is concise and expressive : " A crustacean fixed 

 by its head, and kicking the food mto its mouth with its 

 legs." It is not the change of this creature into a goose 

 that science can now surprise us with ; that story must be 

 given up along with the accomits of grilfins, pha'nixes, and 

 dragons. The fruit theory as to its origin must also be 

 abandoned, l)ut though the new account does not 

 inxolve quite so violent a transition as that from the vege- 



