Drayton (1613) in his Poly-olbion, iii., in connexion with the river Dee, 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." In the Entertaining Library, "Habits of Birds," pp. 363-379., the whole story of this extraordinary instance of ignorance in natural history is amply developed. The barnacle shells which I once saw in a sea-port, attached to a vessel just arrived from the Mediterranean, had the brilliant appearance, at a distance, of flowers in bloom[[1]]; the foot of the Lepas anatifera (Linnæus) appearing to me like the stalk of a plant growing from the ship's side: the shell had the semblance of a calyx, and the flower consisted of the fingers (tentacula) of the shell-fish, "of which twelve project in an elegant curve, and are used by it for making prey of small fish." The very ancient error was to mistake the foot of the shell-fish for the neck of a goose, the shell for its head, and the tentacula for a tuft of feathers. As to the body, non est inventus. The Barnacle Goose is a well-known bird: and these shell-fish, bearing, as seen out of the water, resemblance to the goose's neck, were ignorantly, and without investigation, confounded with geese themselves, an error into which Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) did not fall, and in which Pope Pius II. proved himself infallible. Nevertheless, in France, the Barnacle Goose may be eaten on fast-days by virtue of this old belief in its marine origin.
T. J. Buckton
Footnote 1:[(return)]
See Penny Cycl., art. Cirripeda, vii. 208., reversing the woodcut.
DIAL INSCRIPTIONS.
(Vol. iv., p. 507. Vol. v., p. 155., &c.)
In the churchyard of Areley-Kings, Worcestershire (where is the singular memorial to Sir Harry Coningsby, which I mentioned at Vol. vi.,