Meyer wrote a treatise on this strange “bird without father or mother,” and Sir Robert Murray, in the “Philosophical Transactions,” says that, “these shells are hung at the tree by a neck, longer than the shell, of a filmy substance, round and hollow and creased, not unlike the windpipe of a chicken, spreading out broadest where it is fastened to the tree, from which it seems to draw and convey the matter which serves for the growth and vegetation of the shell and the little bird within it.  In every shell that I opened,” he adds, “I found a perfect sea-fowl; the little bill like that of a goose, the eyes marked; the head, neck, breast, wing, tail, and feet formed; the feathers everywhere perfectly shaped, and the feet like those of other water-fowl.”  The Chinese have a tradition of certain trees, the leaves of which were finally changed into birds.

With this story may be compared that of the oyster-bearing tree, which Bishop Fleetwood describes in his “Curiosities of Agriculture and Gardening,” written in the year 1707.  The oysters as seen, he says, by the Dominican Du Tertre, at Guadaloupe, grew on the branches of trees, and, “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.”  Kircher speaks of a tree in Chili, the leaves of which brought forth a certain kind of worm, which eventually became changed into serpents; and describes a plant which grew in the Molucca Islands, nicknamed “catopa,” on account of its leaves when falling off being transformed into butterflies.

Among some of the many other equally wonderful plants may be mentioned the “stony wood,” which is thus described by Gerarde:—­“Being at Rugby, about such time as our fantastic people did with great concourse and multitudes repair and run headlong unto the sacred wells of Newnam Regis, in the edge of Warwickshire, as unto the Waters of Life, which could cure all diseases.”  He visited these healing-wells, where he, “found growing over the same a fair ash-tree, whose boughs did hang over the spring of water, whereof some that were seare and rotten, and some that of purpose were broken off, fell into the water and were all turned into stone.  Of these, boughs, or parts of the tree, I brought into London, which, when I had broken into pieces, therein might be seen that the pith and all the rest was turned into stones, still remaining the same shape and fashion that they were of before they were in the water.”  Similarly, Sir John Maundeville notices the “Dead Sea fruit”—­fruit found on the apple-trees near the Dead Sea.  To quote his own words:—­ “There be full