BARNACLES. 247 
It is strange that in matters concerning the marvellous, 
even men of education will take pains to deceive them- 
selves, and, instead of investigating nature with a “learned 
spirit,” give a license to ill-directed imagination, and credit 
absurdities. When such men are so credulous, how can 
we wonder at the superstitions of the illiterate ? 
The first phase of the story in question is, that certain 
trees, resembling willows, more particularly in one of the 
Orkneys, Pomona, produced at the ends of their branches 
small swelled balls, containing the embryo of a goose 
suspended by the bill, which, when ripe, fell off into the 
sea and took wing. 
So long ago as the twelfth century, the story was pro- 
THE BARNACLE GOOSE. 
mulgated by Giraldus Cambrensis, in his “ Topographia 
Hiberniz,” and Munster, Saxo Grammaticus, Scaliger, 
Fulgosus, Bishop Leslie,.and Olaus Magnus, all attested to 
