566 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was inveighed against with great unction by Sir Giraldus Cambrensis, 

 who treated the subject, in the twelfth century, in his " Topographia, 

 Hiberniae." Michel Drayton refers to it, in his " Polyolbion : " 



" The barnacles with them, which, wheresoe'er they breed — 

 On trees or rotten ships — yet to my fens for feed 

 Continually they come, and chief abode do make, 

 And very hardly forced my plenty to forsake." 



Fig. 1. 



Lepas Anatifeba— Common Ship-Barnacles. 



Baptista Porta refers to it, about the year 1500, and Count Meyer 

 devoted a volume to it — " Yolucris Arborea." The earliest published 

 statement, by an eye-witness, is contained in the " Cosmograph and 

 Description of Albion," of Hector Boece, while the earliest pictorial 

 illustration of the goose-tree, and its animal fruiting, is contained in 

 the " Cosmographia Universalis " of Sebastian Munster, printed at 

 Basel, 1572. 



In the middle of the sixteenth century, Turner, the English orni- 

 thologist, wrote as follows : " Nobody has ever seen the nest or egg 

 of the barnacle ; nor is this marvelous, inasmuch as it is without par- 

 ents, and is spontaneously generated in the following manner : When, 

 at a certain time, an old ship, a plank, or a pine mast rots in the sea, 

 something like fungus at first breaks out thereupon, which at length puts 

 on the manifest form of birds. Afterward, these are clothed with 

 feathers, and at last become living and flying fowl. Should this ap- 



