Maie or June, and come to fulnesse of feathers in the moneth after.  And thus hauing, through God’s assistance, discoursed somewhat at large of Grasses, Herbes, Shrubs, Trees, Mosses, and certaine excrescences of the earth, with other things moe incident to the Historic thereof, we conclude and end our present volume, with this woonder of England.  For which God’s name be euer honored and praised.”  It is to be remarked that Gerard’s description of the goose-progeny of the barnacle tree exactly corresponds with the appearance of the bird known to ornithologists as the “barnacle-goose”; and there can be no doubt that, skilled as was this author in the natural history lore of his day, there was no other feeling in his mind than that of firm belief in and pious wonder at the curious relations between the shells and their fowl-offspring.  Gerard thus attributes the origin of the latter to the barnacles.  He says nothing of the “wormeetin” holes and burrows so frequently mentioned by Boece, nor would he have agreed with the latter in crediting the “nature of the occeane see” with their production, save in so far as their barnacle-parents lived and existed in the waters of the ocean.

The last account of this curious fable which we may allude to in the present instance is that of Sir Robert Moray, who, in his work entitled “A Relation concerning Barnacles,” published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1677-78, gives a succinct account of these crustaceans and their bird-progeny.  Sir Robert is described as “lately one of his Majesties Council for the Kingdom of Scotland,” and we may therefore justly assume his account to represent that of a cultured, observant person of his day and generation.  The account begins by remarking that the “most ordinary trees” found in the western islands of Scotland “are Firr and Ash.”  “Being,” continues Sir Robert, “in the Island of East (Uist), I saw lying upon the shore a cut of a large Firr tree of about 2-1/2 foot diameter, and 9 or 10 foot long; which had lain so long out of the water that it was very dry:  And most of the shells that had formerly cover’d it, were worn or rubb’d off.  Only on the parts that lay next the ground, there still hung multitudes of little Shells; having within them little Birds, perfectly shap’d, supposed to be Barnacles.”  Here again the description applies to the barnacles; the “little birds” they are described as containing being of course the bodies of the shell-fish.

“The Shells,” continues the narrator, “hang at the Tree by a Neck longer than the Shell;” this “neck” being represented by the stalk of the barnacle.  The neck is described as being composed “of a kind of filmy substance, round, and hollow, and creased, not unlike the Wind-pipe 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.”