Or, as they are sometimes called, Bernicles, belong to what naturalists term the class Cirrhopoda, sometimes spelled cirripeda, which appears to be derived from the Latin cirrus—a tuft or lock of hair curled, and pede—a foot; hence the term may be translated hairy-footed. Such of our readers as have seen the Common or Duck Barnacle, (Pentalasmis anatifera,) will at once understand the applicability of this term. Many a piece of drift wood comes to land literally covered with long fleshy stalks, generally of a purplish red colour, twisting and curling in all directions, and terminating in delicate porcelain-like shells, clear and brittle, of a white colour, just tinged with blue, from between which project the many-jointed cirrhi, or hair-like tentacles, which serve the purpose of a casting net, to seize and drag to the mouth of the animal, its prey, which consists of small mollusks and crustacea.
This is the Barnacle about which such strange stories are told by old writers, who affirmed that the Barnacle or Brent Goose, that in winter visits our shores, is produced from these fleshy foot-stalks and hairy shells by a natural process of growth, or, as some philosophers of our day would say, of development. Gerard, who, in 1597, wrote a “Historie of Plants,” describes the process by which the fish is transformed into the bird; telling his readers that as “the shells gape, the legs hang out, that the bird growing bigger and bigger the shells open more and more, till at length it is attached only by the bill, soon after which it drops into the sea; there it acquires feathers, and grows to a fowle.” There is an amusing illustration given in Gerard’s book, where the young Geese are represented hanging on the branches of trees, just ready to drop into the water, where a number of those that have previously fallen, like ripe fruit, and attained their full plumage, are sailing about very contentedly. It was part of this theory that the Barnacles were of vegetable origin, they grew upon trees, or sprung out of the ground like mushrooms; so we find in the works of an old poet named Du Bartas, these lines:—
“So slow Bootes underneath him sees
In the icy islands goslings hatched of trees,
Whose fruitful leaves, falling into the water,
Are turned, as known, to living fowls soon after;
So rotten planks of broken ships do change
To Barnacles. O transformation strange!
’Twas first a green tree, then a broken hull,
Lately a mushroom, now a flying Gull.”