286 SEA FABLES EXPLAINED. 



BARNACLE GEESE GOOSE BARNACLES. 



THE belief that some wild geese, instead of being hatched 

 from eggs, like other birds, grew on trees and rotten 

 wood has never been surpassed as a specimen of ignorant 

 credulity and persistent error. 



There are two principal versions of this absurd notion. 

 One is that certain trees, resembling willows, and growing 

 always close to the sea, produced at the ends of their 

 branches fruit in form like apples, and each containing 

 the embryo of a goose, which, when the fruit was ripe, fell 

 into the water and flew away. The other is that the geese 

 were bred from a fungus growing on rotten timber floating 

 at sea, and were first developed in the form of worms in 

 the substance of the wood. 



When and whence this improbable theory had its origin 

 is uncertain. Aristotle does not mention it, and con- 

 sequently Pliny and ^Elian were deprived of the pleasure 

 they would have felt in handing down to posterity, without 

 investigation or correction, a statement so surprising. It is, 

 comparatively, a modern myth ; although we find that 

 it was firmly established in the middle of the twelfth 

 century, for Gerald de Barri, known in literature as 

 Giraldus Cambrensis, mentions it in his * Topographia 

 Hiberniae,' published in 1 187. Giraldus, who was Archdeacon 

 of Brecknock in the reign of Henry II., and tried hard, more 

 than once, for the bishopric of St. David's, the functions of 

 which he had temporarily administered without obtaining 



