304 SEA FABLES EXPLAINED. 



maturity (referring probably to caterpillars being developed 

 into moths), but that birds should be thus generated, he 

 says, is simply the repetition of a vulgar error, for not one 

 of the authors whose works he has examined has seen what 

 they all affirm ; nor are they able to bring forward a single 

 eye-witness of it. He asks how it can be possible that 

 animals so large and so highly-organised as these birds 

 can grow from puny animalcules generated in putrid 

 wood. He further declares that these British geese are 

 hatched from eggs like other geese, which he considers 

 proved by the testimony of Albertus Magnus, Gerhardus 

 de Vera, and of Dutch seamen, who, in 1569, gave their 

 written declaration that they had personally seen these 

 birds sitting on their eggs, and hatching them, on the 

 coasts of Nova Zembla. 



In marked and disgraceful contrast with this careful 

 and philosophical investigation and its author's just deduc- 

 tions from it, is 'A Relation concerning Barnacles by 

 Sir Robert Moray, lately one of His Majesty's Council for 

 the Kingdom of Scotland/ read before the Royal Society, 

 and published in the ' Philosophical Transactions,' No. 137, 

 January and February, 1678. 



People had begun to see the absurdity of the story, and 

 the fallacy was dying out, when this sage philosopher, a 

 distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society, and who, I 

 find, was "nominated vice-president and sworn as such," 

 July 1 8th, 1666, undertook to investigate the subject, and 

 made a journey northward for that purpose. The account 

 he gave of his precious researches, and the publication of 

 it under the auspices of so learned a body of savants, partly 

 reinstated the error in popular opinion, though only for a 

 short time. 



Describing "a cut of a large Firr-tree of about two and 

 a half feet diameter, and nine or ten feet long," which he 



