188 THE WILD-FOWLER. 



in that century ; he makes some strong remarks upon those who had 

 asserted such fabulous stories respecting the barnacle.* 



Another author, who wrote in the following- century, also makes 

 allusion to the singularly delusive notion, and attributes the solution 

 of the story to the Dutch. f 



Those who may wish to inquire into the natural existence of the 

 barnacle as a curious species of shell-fish will find an interesting 

 account of it in an amusing little work called " The Sea-side Book," 

 by W. H. Harvey, M.D., 1857 (fourth edition), wherein the author 

 states it to belong to the class of animals called Cirrhipoda, which 

 combine the characters of Crustacea and mollusca. 



* " But that all these stories are false and fabulous, I am confidently persuaded. 

 Neither do there want sufficient arguments to induce the lovers of truth to be of our 

 opinion, and to convince the gainsayers. For in the whole genus of birds (excepting 

 the phoenix, whose reputed original is without doubt fabulous) there is not any one 

 example of equivocal or spontaneous generation. 



Those shells in which they affirm these birds to be bred, and to come forth by a 

 strange metamorphosis, do most certainly contain an a.nimal of their own kind, and 

 not transmutable into any other thing." 



f " To finish this Treatise of Sea Plants, let me bring this admirable tale of 

 untruth to your consideration, that whatsoever hath formerly beene related con- 

 cerning the breeding of those Barnackles, to be from shels growing on trees, &c., is 

 utterly erroneous, their breeding and hatching being found out by the Dutch and 

 others in their navigations to the northward, as that third of the Dutch in anno 

 1536 doth declare." Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum t page 1306. London: 

 1640. Folio. 



