BARNACLES.
(Vol. viii., p. 223.)
In reference to the article on the barnacle bird in "N. & Q." as above, I send you a paper which I lately put in our local journal (The Tralee Chronicle), containing a collection of notices of the curious errors and gradual correction of them, on the subject of the barnacle. I fear it may be long for your columns, but don't know how to shorten it; nor can I well omit another amusing notice of the subject, to which, since I published it, an intelligent friend called my attention; it is from the Memoirs of Lady Fanshaw:—
"When we came to Calais, we met the Earl of Strafford and Sir Kenelm Digby, with some others of our countrymen; we were all feasted at the Governor's of the castle, and much excellent discourse passed; but, as was reason, most share was Sir Kenelm Digby's, who had enlarged somewhat more in extraordinary stories than might be averred, and all of them passed with great applause and wonder of the French then at table; but the concluding one was—that barnacles, a bird in Jersey, was first a shell-fish to appearance, and from that sticking upon old wood, became in time a bird. After some consideration, they unanimously burst out into laughter, believing it altogether false, and, to say the truth, it was the only thing true he had discoursed with them!—that was his infirmity, tho' otherwise a person of most excellent parts, and a very free bred gentleman."—Lady Fanshaw's Memoirs, pp. 72-3.
A. B. R.
Belmont.
As a tail-piece to the curious information communicated respecting these strange creatures in Vol. i., pp. 117. 169. 254. 340., Vol. viii., pp. 124. 223., may be added an advertisement, extracted from the monthly compendium annexed to La Belle Assemblée, or Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine, for June, 1807, in the following terms:
"Wonderful natural curiosity, called the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or Tree bearing Geese, taken up at sea, on the 12th of January, 1807, by Captain Bytheway, and was more than twenty men could raise out of the water, which may be seen at the Exhibition Rooms, Spring Gardens, from ten o'clock in the morning till ten at night, every day. Admission, one shilling; children half-price.
"The Barnacles which form the present Exhibition, possess a neck upwards of two feet in length, resembling the windpipe of a chicken; each shell contains five pieces, and notwithstanding the many thousands which hang to eight inches of the tree, part of the fowl may be seen from each shell. Sir Robert Moxay, in the Wonders of Nature and Art, speaking of this singularly curious production, says, in every shell he opened he found a perfect sea-fowl, with a bill like that of a goose, feet like those of water-fowl, and the feathers all plainly formed.
"The above wonderful and almost indescribable curiosity, is the only exhibition of the kind in the world."
μ.