THE GOOSE QUESTION. 565 



OUR ANCESTORS ON THE GOOSE QUESTION. 



LET us consider the views entertained by our ancestors for centu- 

 ries on the goose question : we may gather lessons from it that 

 will be very applicable to-day. They believed for five hundred years 

 that a certain kind of goose was of vegetable origin, and grew on trees. 

 The story is ancient and obscure, and much ingenuity has been spent 

 in explaining it. Without attempting to reconcile its contradictions, 

 or account for its origin, we will only here give a brief outline of the 

 tradition. 



Belonging to that division of the animal kingdom known as articu- 

 lates or jointed animals, there is a class called crustaceans, from the 

 crust-like shell with which the body and legs are covered, and of which 

 lobsters, crabs, and shrimps, are examples. Among these is a group 

 known as " Cirripedia," from the cirri, or curls of hair, in which their 

 long and slender feet terminate. They are inclosed in a more or less 

 conical shell, and some of them are pedunculated ; that is, their main 

 body hangs from a stalk, pedicle, or peduncle, of varying length, which 

 permits of some degree of motion. They attach themselves to floating 

 objects, as plank, worm-eaten fragments of wreck, ships' sides, and 

 sometimes to the cuticle of the whale. These creatures are more 

 familiarly known as barnacles, and Fig. 1 represents a pendent group 

 of common ship-barnacles, which are described as having " a flesh- 

 colored, translucent, wrinkled stem, possibly more than a foot long, 

 and from this stem there dangles a triangular, pearly-shelled fish, the 

 valves of which, bordered with the most lovely orange, from time to 

 time open and disclose several pairs of curling feelers." The soft part 

 within this shell, in old times, used to be mistaken for a little bird. 



There is in England a well-known species of goose called the 

 barnacle-goose. " It is a winter migrant on the east coast ; its 

 summer home, where it breeds, being the high latitudes of Northern 

 Europe. It is a very handsome species, a vegetable-feeder, and excel- 

 lent eating." Now, it would seem to be a very simple matter to end 

 the story by saying that it was long believed that barnacle-geese had 

 their origin in the barnacle-shells we have just referred to, but the 

 case is more complex ; the shells bearing the geese were believed to 

 grow on trees. This belief, that the barnacle-shell is transformed into 

 the barnacle-goose, was well established, as early as the twelfth and 

 thirteenth centuries, and was referred to and contradicted by both 

 Albertus Magnus and by Roger Bacon. That the opinion was held 

 as a firm reality is sufficiently proved by the fact that barnacle-geese 

 were allowed to be eaten during Lent, under the idea that they were 

 not fowl, but fish — an elastic zoology that served to widen ecclesiasti- 

 cal dietetics, although to the scandal of the more strict, as the practice 



