"The shell gapeth open, and the first thing that appeareth is the fore said lace or string; next come the leg of the birde hanging out, and as it groweth greater, it openeth the shell by degrees, till at length it is all come forth, and hangeth only by the bill, and falleth into the sea, when it gathereth feathers and groweth to a foule, bigger than a mallart; for the truth hereof, if any doubt, may it please them to repair unto me, and I shall satisfie them by the testimonies of good witnesses."
As far back as the thirteenth century, the same story is traced in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis. This great divine does not deny the truth of the miraculous origin of the Barnacle Geese, but he warns the Irish priests against dining off them during Lent on the plea that they were not flesh, but fish. For, he writes, "If a man during Lent were to dine off a leg of Adam, who was not born of flesh either, we should not consider him innocent of having eaten what is flesh." This modern myth, which, in spite of the protests of such men as Albertus Magnus, Æneas Sylvius, and others, maintained its ground for many centuries, and was defended, as late as 1629, in a book by Count Maier, "De volucri arborea," with arguments, physical, metaphysical, and theological, owed its origin to a play of words. The muscle shells are called Bernaculæ from the Latin perna, the mediæval Latin berna; the birds are called Hibernicæ or Hiberniculæ, abbreviated to Berniculæ. As their names seem one, the creatures are supposed to be one, and everything conspires to confirm the first mistake, and to invest what was originally a good Irish story—a mere canard—with all the dignity of scientific, and all the solemnity of theological truth. The myth continued to live until the age of Newton. Specimens of Lepadidæ, prepared by Professor Rolleston of Oxford, show how the outward appearance of the Anatifera could have supported the popular superstition which derived the Bernicla, the goose, from the Bernicula, the shell.
Drayton (1613), in his "Poly-olbion," iii., in connexion with the river Lee, speaks of
"Th' anatomised fish and fowls from planchers sprung;"
to which a note is appended in Southey's edition, p. 609, that such fowls were "Barnacles, a bird breeding upon old ships." A bunch of the shells attached to the ship, or to a piece of floating timber, at a distance appears like flowers in bloom; the foot of the animal has a similitude to the stalk of a plant growing from the ship's sides, the shell resembles a calyx, and the flower consists of the tentacula, or fingers, of the shell-fish. The ancient error was to mistake the foot for the neck of a goose, the shell for its head, and the tentacula for feathers. As to the body, non est inventus.
Sir Kenelm Digby was soundly laughed at for relating to a party at the castle of the Governor of Calais, that "the Barnacle, a bird in Jersey, was first a shell-fish to appearance, and, from that striking upon old wood, became in time a bird." In 1807, there was exhibited in Spring-gardens, London, a "Wonderful natural curiosity, called the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or Tree bearing Geese," taken up at sea on January 12th, and more than twenty men could raise out of the water. [26]
Sir J. Emerson Tennent asks whether the ready acceptance and general credence given to so obvious a fable may not have been derived from giving too literal a construction to the text of the passage in the first chapter of Genesis:—
"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and the fowl that may fly in the open firmament of heaven."
The Barnacle Goose is a well-known bird, and is eaten on fast-days in France, by virtue of this old belief in its marine origin. The belief in the barnacle origin of the bird still prevails on the west coast of Ireland, and in the Western Highlands of Scotland.