One additional fact I may mention as to the existence of the goose and barnacle legend in the East. I am informed that in Java there is, according to "native" story, a shell-fish the animal of which becomes transformed into a bird—said to be a kind of snipe—and flies from the shell. I have been shown the shell by a Dutch lady who has lived in Java. It is a large fresh-water mussel, one of the Unionidæ. I have failed to obtain, after inquiry, any further information as to the prevalence or origin of this story in Java, and hope that some one who reads this page may be able to help me.
Before leaving the story of the goose and the barnacle, the explanation of the myth given by Prof. Max Müller in his lectures on the science of language nearly fifty years ago, should be cited. It is an excellent example of the misuse of hypothesis in investigation, and the attempt to explain something which we cannot get at and examine by making a supposition which it is even more difficult to examine and test.
Max Müller made use of the observation—a perfectly true and interesting one—that a whole people or folk will be led to a wrong conclusion, or to a belief in some strange and marvellous occurrence, by the misunderstanding of a single word, attributing to that word a sense which now fits the sound, but one quite different from that with which the word was originally used in the tradition or history concerned. Words are, in fact, misinterpreted after a lapse of time, or when imported from distant lands, just as we have seen that pictures and sculpture often have been. For instance, Richard Whittington, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1398 and other later years, did business in French goods, which was spoken of in the city as "achat," and pronounced "akat." Hence in later centuries, when the prevalence of Norman French was forgotten, it was stated (in a play produced in 1605) that Whittington owed his fortune to "a cat," and the story of the wonderful cat and its deeds was built up "line upon line" or "lie upon lie." Max Müller suggested that the story of the barnacle and the goose could be similarly explained. The brant or brent goose which frequents the Irish shore was, he supposes, called "berniculus" by the Latin-speaking clergy as a diminutive of Hibernicus, meaning "Irish." There is absolutely no evidence to support this. Max Müller supposes that Hibernicus became "Hiberniculus," and then dropping the first syllable became "Berniculus," and that this word was applied to the "Irish goose." It might have been, but there is nothing to show that it was. Meanwhile the ship's barnacle and other sea-shells were called in the Celtic tongue "barnagh," "berniche," or "bernak," and the hermit-crab is still called on the Breton coast, "Bernard l'hermite," a modification of "bernak l'hermite." There is no doubt that the word "barnacle" as applied to the stalked shell-fish growing on ships' bottoms is a diminutive of the Celtic word "bernak," or "barnak." It became in Latin "barnacus," and then the diminutive "barnaculus," and so "barnacle" was used for the little stalked shell-fish encrusting old timber. According to Max Müller, later generations thus found the two animals, goose and shell-fish, called by the same name, "bernikle," or "barnacle." "Why?" they would ask: and then (he supposes) they would compare the two and detect points of resemblance, until at last a very devout and astute monk had the happy thought of declaring that the Hibernian goose was called "berniculus," or "barnak-goose," because it did not breed from eggs as other birds do, but is hatched out of the shell of the shell-fish, also very naturally and rightly called "berniculus," or barnak, as any one may see by carefully examining the fish contained in the shell of the barnacle or little stalked "barnak," which has the complete form of a bird. Since, however, it is not a bird, but a fish in nature and origin, this holy man declared that the "berniculus," or "barnacle-goose," may be eaten on fast days. Max Müller's explanation of the origin of the story is too adventurous in its unsupported assumption that the particular goose associated with the story was peculiarly Irish, or that, in fact, any kind of goose was so. He also put aside the evidence of Father Damien (earlier than the Irish story of Giraldus) referring the goose-tree to an island in the Indies, and the report cited in the Oriental book the "Zohar." However plausible Max Müller's theory may have appeared, it absolutely crumbles and disappears in the presence of the Mykenæan pictures of "barnaculized" geese, and trees budding birds—two thousand years older than the Irish record, and nearly three thousand years earlier than the essay of the charming and persuasive professor.
CHAPTER XVI
SEA-SHELLS ON THE SEASHORE
ANY hard coat or covering enclosing a softer material is called a "shell"—thus we speak of an egg-shell, a nut-shell, a bomb-shell, and the shell of a lobster. But there is a special and restricted use of the word to indicate as "true" and "real" shells the beautiful coverings made for their protection by the soft, mobile animals called Molluscs. These animals expand and contract first this and then that region of the body by squeezing the blood within it (by means of the soft muscular coat of the sac-like body) into one part or another in turn. There is not enough blood to distend the whole animal, and accordingly one part is swollen out and protrudes from the shell, whilst another shrinks as the blood is propelled here or there by the compressing muscular coat. These creatures are the Molluscs, a name which has come into general use (and has even served as the title for a stage-play), as well as being the zoologist's title for the great division of animals which they constitute.
They are sometimes called "shell-fish," but this is no good as a distinctive name—since it is applied in the fish-trade to lobsters, crabs, and shrimps as well as to Molluscs. Lobsters, crabs, and shrimps are Crustacea, and totally different in their architecture and their mechanism from Molluscs. Familiar examples of Molluscs are the oyster, the mussel, the various "clams," and, again, the snails, periwinkles, whelks, and limpets. It is the shells of these animals which are "true" shells in the sense in which the word is used by "collectors" of shells, and in the sense in which we speak of "the shells of the seashore." These shells are usually very hard, solid things, made up of layers of lime-salts and horny matter mixed, and they remain for a long time undestroyed, washed about by the currents of the sea, and thrown up on to the beach, after the soft, oozy creature which formed them—chemically secreted them on its soft skin—has decomposed and disappeared. They are readily distinguished into two sorts—(1) those which are formed in pairs, or "bivalves," each member of the pair being called a "valve"; and (2) those which are single, or "univalves," often spirally twisted, as are those of snails and whelks, but sometimes cap-like or basin-like, as are the shells of the limpets. There is not so great a difference between bivalve and univalve shells as there seems to be at first sight. For if you examine the pair of shells of a mussel or a clam when they are quite fresh, you will find that the valves are joined together by a horny, elastic substance, and are, in fact, only one horny shell, or covering, which is made hard by lime deposited on the right and on the left, as two plates or valves, but is left soft and uncalcified along a line where these two valves meet, so as to allow them to move and gape, as it were, on an elastic hinge. It is the fact that the two valves of the shell of the bivalve, lying right and left on its body, correspond to the single shell of the snail or limpet, which differs from the bivalve-shell in not being divided along the back by a soft part into right and left pieces. That there is this real agreement between bivalve and univalve molluscs is quite evident when we examine the soft animal which forms the shell and is protected by it.
