Diversions of a Naturalist

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

CHAPTER XV
MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND THE
GOOSE

IT is clear that there was a widespread tradition known to the learned in the early centuries of the Christian era, according to which there existed in some distant Eastern land a tree which bore buds or fruits which became converted into birds. Connected with this, and perhaps really a part of it, there existed a tradition that marine "barnacles" gave birth to geese from within their shells, or are in some way converted into geese. The two stories were in some localities and narrations combined, though in others they were distinct. On the coast of Ireland the early missionaries of the Church (learned men acquainted with the traditions of their time) identified the migratory brent goose with the bird said to be produced by the barnacle; and elsewhere, on the Scottish coast, the barnacles were (it was reported) found growing on trees. There is no such resemblance between barnacles and brent geese as to have suggested to the Irish monks the regular and natural conversion of one into the other. It seems most probable that the learned churchmen knew the traditional story already before arriving in Ireland, and applied it to the barnacles and the geese which they discovered around them. Eventually the word "barnacle" without qualification was applied to the geese, as we see in Gerard's account given in the last chapter. Is there, it may be asked, anything further known as to such a tradition, and the place and manner of its origin? In the absence of such knowledge, an ingenious attempt was made by my old friend, Professor Max Müller, to account for the tradition by the similarity of the names, which he erroneously supposed had been given independently to the barnacle and to the "Hibernian" goose. I will refer to this below, but now I will proceed to give the most probable solution of the mystery as to the tradition of the tree, the goose, and the barnacle. Its discovery is not more than twenty years old, and is due to M. Frederic Houssay, a distinguished French zoologist of the Ecole Normale, who published it in the "Revue Archeologique" in 1895. It has not hitherto been brought to the notice of English readers, and I shall therefore give a full account of it.

Fig. 14.—Fanciful designs by Mykenæan artists, showing change of the cuttle-fish (octopus or "poulpe") into a bull's head and other shapes.

a, Octopus drawn on a goblet from Crete, the arms reduced to two, the eyes detached.

b and c, Bull's head variations of the octopus, from designs found at Koban in the Caucasus.

d, Spiral treatment of the arms of the octopus (a pose actually seen in living specimens).

e, f, Human faces painted on Cretan jars across the whole width of the neck, the design being derived from the octopus with detached eyes as in Fig. a. Such designs survive long after their origin is forgotten, as (according to M. Houssay) the legend of the barnacle and the goose survived two thousand years after the Mykenæan drawings assimilating one to the other had been forgotten.

The solution is as follows: The Mykenæan population of the islands of Cyprus and Crete, in the period 800 to 1000 years before Christ, were great makers of pottery, and painted large earthernware basins and vases with a variety of decorative representations of marine life, of fishes, butterflies, birds, and trees. Some of these are to be seen in the British Museum at Bloomsbury, where I examined them a few years ago. Others have been figured by the well-known archæologists, MM. Perrot and Chipiez, in the sixth volume of their work, "L'Ossuaire de Crète." M. Perrot consulted M. Houssay, in his capacity of zoologist, in regard to these Mykenæan drawings, which bear, as M. Houssay states, the evidence of having been designed after nature by one who knew the things in life, although they are not slavishly "copied" from nature. These early Mykenæan painters on pottery were members of a community who worshipped the great mother—"Nature"—as Astarte or Aphrodite risen from the foam of the sea. Being sailors and fishermen, marine life was even more familiar to them than that of the land, and they placed little models of sea animals as votive offerings in the temples of the great mother, and also honoured her in decorating their pottery with marine creatures. The little fish, Hippocampus, called the sea-horse, the sea-urchin, the octopus, the argonaut and its floating cradle, the sea-anemone, and the butterfly-like Pteropod, were subjects used by these artists for which they found terrestrial counterparts. The sea-horse was convertible decoratively into a true horse, with intermediate phases imagined by the artists; the sea-urchin into a hedgehog, the sea-anemone into a flower, and the Pteropod into a true butterfly. These artists loved to exercise a little fancy and ingenuity. By gradual reduction in the number and size of outstanding parts—a common rule in the artistic "schematizing" or "conventional simplification" of natural form—they converted the octopus and the argonaut, with their eight arms, into a bull's head with a pair of spiral horns (Fig. 14). In the same spirit it seems that they observed and drew the barnacle floating on timber or thrown up after a storm on their shores. They detected a resemblance in the marking of its shells to the plumage of a goose, whilst in the curvature of its stalk they saw a resemblance to the long neck of the bird. The barnacle's jointed plumose legs or cirri and other details suggested points of agreement with the feathers of the bird. They brought the barnacle and the goose together, not guided thereto by any pre-existing legend, but by a simple and not uncommon artistic desire to follow up a superficial suggestion of similarity and to conceive of intermediate connecting forms. Some of their fanciful drawings with this purpose are shown in Figs. 15, 16, and 17. These (excepting the drawing of the barnacle lying within its opened shell) are copied from M. Houssay's paper on the subject, and were taken from the work of M. Perrot on Cretan pottery.

Fig. 15.—The Goose and the Barnacle.

A, Drawing of a Ship's Barnacle attached to a piece of timber by its "peduncle" or stalk, which represents the neck of a goose, if we regard the shell-covered region as the goose's body. From a sketch by M. Frederic Houssay published in the "Revue Archæologique," January 1895.

B, Copy of a drawing on an ancient Mykenæan pot found in Crete, and figured by M. Perrot in his "Ossuaire de Crète" vol. vi. p. 936. It is a fantastic blend of the goose and the barnacle. The barnacle's stalk is given a beak and an eye; the body of the bird corresponds to the shells of the barnacle both in shape and marking. There are no wings or legs, but the curious single limb which I have marked pe is obviously the same thing as that marked pe in figure C, which represents the barnacle when cut open so as to show the structures within the shell, pe is the rod-like body at the end of which the seminal duct opens. It is seen in the drawing of the expanded barnacle (Fig. 10), lying between the two groups of six forked and jointed legs or "cirri."

C, A correct modern drawing of a ship's barnacle, with the shells of one side removed so as to show the six double legs of one side, the seminal rod (pe), and the internal organs. This is what Sir Robert Moray and his mediaeval predecessors saw on opening the barnacle's shell and described as "a young bird complete in every detail."