276 The Animal-Lore of Shahspeare s Time. 
credit to himself for giving the first account of its haunts. 
Speaking of the barnacles, he writes:— 
“ Those geese were of a perfit red colour, such as come into Holland 
about Weiringen, and every yeere are there taken in abundance, hut till 
this time it was never knowne where they hatcht their egges, so that 
some men have taken upon them to write, that they sit upon trees in 
Scotland that hang over the water, and such egges as fall from them 
downe into the water become young geese, and swim there out of the 
water; but those that fall upon the land burst asunder and are lost ^ 
but this is now found to be contrary, and it is not to be wondered at,, 
that no man could tell where thej 7 " breed their egges, for that no man 
that ever wee knew, had ever beene under 80 degrees : nor that land 
under 80 degrees was never set downe in any card, much lesse the 
red geese that breed therein.” ( Purchas , vol. iii. p. 484.) 
The pains that Harrison took to fathom the great 
barnacle mystery entitles him to be quoted, at the 
risk of exhausting the reader’s patience. He writes, 
in his description of England prefixed to Holinshed’s 
Chronicles :— 
“ For my part I have been verie desirous to understand the utter¬ 
most of the breeding of barnacles, and questioned with divers persons- 
about the same. I have read also whatsoever is written by forren 
authors touching the generation of that foule, and sought out some 
places where I have beene assured to see great numbers of them : but 
in vaine. Wherefore I utterlie despaired to obteine my purpose, till 
this present yeare of grace 1584, and moneth of Maie, wherein going 
to the Court at Grreenewich from London by bote, I saw sundrie 
ships lieng in the Thames newlie come home, either from Barbarie or 
the Canarie lies (for I doo not well remember now from which of these 
places) on whose sides I perceived an infinit sort of shells to hang so 
thicke as could be one by another. Drawing neere also, I tooke off ten, 
or twelve of the greatest of them, and afterward having opened them, I 
saw the proportion of a foule in one of them more perfectlie than in all 
the rest, saving that the head was not yet formed, bicause the fresh 
water had killed them all (as I take it) and thereby hindered their 
perfection. Certeinlie the feathers of the taile hoong out of the shell at 
least two inches, the wings almost perfect touching forme were garded 
with two shels or sheeldes proportioned like the selfe wings, and like¬ 
wise the brestbone had hir coverture also of like shellie substance, and 
altogither resembling the figure which Lobell and Pena doo give foortlr 
