The Goose Tree. From Gerarde’s Herbal.
Martin assures us that he had seen many of these fowls in the shells, sticking to the trees by the bill, but acknowledges that he had never descried any of them with life upon the tree, though the natives [of the Orkney Isles] had seen them move in the heat of the sun.
In the ‘Cosmographiæ of Albioun,’ Boëce (to whom we have before referred) considered the nature of the seas acting on old wood more relevant to the creation of barnacle or claik geese than anything else. “For,” he says, “all trees that are cassin into the seas, by process of time appears at first worm-eaten, and in the small holes or bores thereof grows small worms. First they show their head and neck, and last of all they show their feet and wings. Finally, when they are come to the just measure and quantity of geese, they fly in the air, as other fowls wont, as was notably proven in the year of God one thousand four hundred and eighty in the sight of many people beside the castle of Pitslego.” He then goes on to describe how a tree having been cast up by the sea, and split by saws, was found full of these geese, in different stages of their growth, some being “perfect shapen fowls;” and how the people, “having ylk day this tree in more admiration,” at length deposited it in the kirk of St. Andrew’s, near Tyre.”
Among the more uninformed of the Scotch peasantry, there still exists a belief that the Soland goose, or gannet, and not the bernicle, grows by the bill on the cliffs of Bass, of Ailsa, and of St. Kilda.
Giraldus traces the origin of these birds to the gelatinous drops of turpentine which appear on the branches of Fir-trees.
“A tree that bears oysters is a very extraordinary thing,” remarks Bishop Fleetwood in his ‘Curiosities of Agriculture and Gardening’ (1707), “but the Dominican Du Tertre, in his Natural History of Antego, assures us that he saw, at Guadaloupa, oysters growing on the branches of trees. These are his very words. The oysters 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.”
The Oyster-bearing Tree, however, is not the only marvel of which the good Bishop has left a record: he tells us that near the island Cimbalon there lies another, where grows a tree whose leaves, as they fall off, change into animals: they are no sooner on the ground, than they begin to walk like a hen, upon two little legs. Pigafetta says that he kept one of these leaves eight days in a porringer; that it took itself to walking as soon as he touched it; and that it lived only upon the air.
Scaliger, speaking of these very leaves, remarks, as though he had been an eye-witness, that they walk, and march away without further ado if anyone attempts to touch them. Bauhin, after describing these wonderful leaves as being very like Mulberry-leaves, but with two short and pointed feet on each side, remarks upon the great prodigy of the leaf of a tree being changed into an animal, obtaining sense, and being capable of progressive motion.
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