. I
1
Martin assures us that he had seen many of these fowls in the
shells, sticking to the trees by the bill, but acknowledges that he
had never descried any of them with life upon the tree, though the
natives [of the Orkney Isles] had seen them move in the heat
of the sun.
In the ‘ Cosmographiae of Albioun,’ Boece (to whom we have
before referred) considered the nature of the seas acting on old
wood more relevant to the creation of barnacle or claik geese than
anything else. “ For,” he says, “ all trees that are cassin into the seas,
by process of time appears at first worm-eaten, and in the small
holes or bores thereof grows small worms. First they show their
head and neck, and last of all they show their feet and wings.
Finally, when they are come to the just measure and quantity of
geese, they fly in the air, as other fowls wont, as was notably
proven in the year of God one thousand four hundred and eighty
in the sight of many people beside the castle of Pitslego.” He then
goes on to describe how a tree having been cast up by the sea, and
split by saws, was found full of these geese, in different stages of
their growth,_ some being “ perfect shapen fow ls;” and how the
people, “ haying ylk day this tree in more admiration,” at length
deposited it in the kirk of St. Andrew’s, near Tyre.”
Among the more uninformed of the Scotch peasantry, there
still exists a belief that the Soland goose, or gannet, and not the
bernicle, grows by the bill on the cliffs of Bass, of Ailsa, and of
St. Kilda.
Giraldus traces the origin of these birds to the gelatinous drops
of turpentine which appear on the branches of Fir-trees.
“ A tree that bears oysters is a very extraordinary thing,”
remarks Bishop Fleetwood in his ‘ Curiosities of Agriculture anc.
Gardening ’ (1707), “ but the Dominican Du Tertre, in his Natural
History of Antego, assures us that he saw, at Guadaloupa, oysters
growing on the branches of trees. These are his very words. The
oysters are not larger than the little English oysters, that is to say,
about the size of a crown piece. They stick to the branches that
hang in the water of a tree called Paretuvier. No doubt the seed of
the oysters, which is shed in the. tree when they spawn, cleaves to
those branches, so that the oysters form themselves there, and grow
bigger in process of time, and by their weight bend down the
branches into the sea, and then are refreshed twice a day by the
flux and reflux of it.”
The Oyster-bearing Tree, however, is not the only marvel of
which the good Bishop has left a record : he tells us that near the
island Cimbalon there lies another, where grows a tree whose
leaves, as they fall off, change into animals : they are no sooner
on the ground, than they begin to walk like a hen, upon two little
legs. Pigafetta says that he kept one of these leaves eight days in a
porringer ; that it took itself to walking as soon as he touched i t ;
and that it lived only upon the air.” Scahger, speaking of these