CURIOUS CREATURES. 177 



Fruit falling in the Sea; and these shortly after, get 

 wings, and fly to the tame or wild ducks." And, whilst 

 discoursing on Geese, he affirms that " some breed from 

 Trees, as I said of Scotland Ducks in the former Chapter." 

 Sebastian Miienster, from whom I have taken the pre- 

 ceding illustration, says in his Cosmographia Universalis : 

 " In Scotland there are trees which produce fruit, con- 

 glomerated of their leaves ; and this fruit, when, in due 

 time, it falls into the water beneath it, is endowed with 

 new life, and is converted into a living bird, which they 

 call the ' tree goose.' This tree grows in the Island 

 of Pomonia, which is not far from Scotland, towards 

 the North. Several old Cosmographers, especially Saxo 

 Grammaticus, mention the tree, and it must not be 

 regarded as fictitious, as some new writers suppose." 



In Camden's " Britannia " (translated by Edmund Gib- 

 son, Bishop of London) he says, speaking of Buchan : 

 "It is hardly worth while to mention the clayks, a sort 

 of geese ; which are believed by some, (with great admira- 

 tion) to grow upon the trees on this coast and in other 

 places, and, when they are ripe, to fall down into the 

 sea ; because neither their nests nor eggs can anywhere 

 be found. But they who saw the ship, in which Sir 

 Francis Drake sailed round the world, when it was laid 

 up in the river Thames, could testify, that little birds 

 breed in the old rotten keels of ships ; since a great 

 number of such, without life and feathers, stuck close to 

 the outside of the keel of that ship ; yet I should think, 

 that the generation of these birds was not from the logs 

 of wood, but from the sea, termed by the poets ' the 

 parent of all things. ' " 



In " Purchas, his Pilgrimage," is the voyage of Gerat 

 de Veer to China, &c., in 1569 and he speaks of the 



