122 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 



time of maturity doe open and out of them grow those 

 little living things which, falling into the water, doe 

 become foules whom we call Barnacles, in the north of 

 England Brent Geese, and in Lancashire Tree Geese." 

 Gerard is here either adopting or suggesting an identi- 

 fication of the tradition of the tree which produces 

 birds from its buds, with the floating timber bearing 

 ship's barnacles, which were supposed to give birth to 

 the brent geese. He does not say that he has seen, or 

 knows persons who have seen, the barnacles attached 

 to the branches of living trees. Nevertheless, he gives 

 a picture of them so attached (Fig. 13). It has been 

 suggested, in later times, that such a fixation of barnacles 

 to the branches of living trees might occur in some of 

 the sea-water lochs of the west of Scotland, — just as 

 oysters become attached to the mangrove trees in the 

 West Indies, — and it has further been suggested that 

 willows might thus droop their branches into the sea- 

 water, and that the catkins on the willow-shoots might 

 be taken for an early stage of growth of the barnacles ; 

 but I have not come across any record of such fixation 

 of barnacles on living shrubs or branches of trees, and I 

 am inclined to think that Gerard's story of what occurs in 

 the distant Orkneys is merely an attempt to substantiate 

 the bird-producing tree of the Oriental story, by quietly 

 assuming that the sea-borne timber covered with barnacles 

 existed somewhere as living trees and exhibited this same 

 property of budding forth barnacles which on opening liber- 

 ated each a minute gosling. Gerard continues as follows : 

 " But what our eyes have seen and hands have handled 

 we shall declare." There is, he tells us, a small island in 

 Lancashire called the Pile of Foulders, and there rotten 

 trees and the broken timbers of derelict ships are thrown 

 up by the sea. On them forms " a certain spume or 

 froth which in time breeds into certaine shells." He 



