130 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 



Gerard's account given in the last chapter. Is there, it 

 may be asked, anything further known as to such a 

 tradition, and the place and manner of its origin ? In 

 the absence of such knowledge, an ingenious attempt 

 was made by my old friend, Professor Max Muller, to 

 account for the tradition by the similarity of the names, 

 which he erroneously supposed had been given indepen- 

 dently to the barnacle and to the " Hibernian " goose. 

 I will refer to this below, but now I will proceed to 

 give the most probable solution of the mystery as to the 

 tradition of the tree, the goose, and the barnacle. Its 

 discovery is not more than twenty years old, and is due 

 to M. Frederic Houssay, a distinguished French zoologist 

 of the Ecole Normale, who published it in the " Revue 

 Archeologique " in 1895. It has not hitherto been 

 brought to the notice of English readers, and I shall 

 therefore give a full account of it. 



The solution is as follows : The Mykenaean popula- 

 tion of the islands of Cyprus and Crete, in the period 

 800 to 1000 years before Christ, were great makers of 

 pottery, and painted large earthernware basins and vases 

 with a variety of decorative representations of marine 

 life, of fishes, butterflies, birds, and trees. Some of these 

 are to be seen in the British Museum at Bloomsbury, 

 where I examined them a few years ago. Others have been 

 figured by the well-known archaeologists, MM. Perrot and 

 Chipiez, in the sixth volume of their work, " L'Ossuaire 

 de Crete." M. Perrot consulted M. Houssay, in his 

 capacity of zoologist, in regard to these Mykenaean 

 drawings, which bear, as M. Houssay states, the evidence 

 of having been designed after nature by one who knew 

 the things in life, although they are not slavishly 

 " copied " from nature. These early Mykenaean painters 

 on pottery were members of a community who worshipped 



