Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/569

Rh requires more than mere passing notice—the myth of the barnacle geese. This is at least as old as the twelfth century. It appeared for the next two centuries in two forms—one that trees growing near the sea produced fruit like apples, each containing the embryo of a goose, which, when the fruit was ripe, fell into the water and flew away. In the other the geese were supposed to emanate from a fungus growing on rotting timber floating at sea. (It is the myth in the latter form which Gerard gives.) One of the earliest mentions of this myth is to be found in Giraldus Cambrensis (Topographia Hiberniae, 1187), a zealous reformer of Church abuses. In his protest against eating these barnacle geese during Lent, he writes thus "There are here many birds which are called Bernacae which Nature produces in a manner contrary to nature and very wonderful. They are like marsh geese but smaller. They are produced from fir-timber tossed about at sea, and are at first like geese upon it. Afterwards they hang down by their beaks as if from a sea-weed attached to the wood and are enclosed in shells that they may grow the more freely. Having thus in course of time been clothed with a strong covering of feathers, they either fall into the water or seek their liberty in the air by flight. The embryo geese derive their growth and nutriment from the moisture of the wood or of the sea, in a secret and most marvellous manner. I have seen with my own eyes more than a thousand minute bodies of these birds hanging from one piece of timber on the shore, enclosed in shells and already formed in no corner of the world have they been known to build a nest. Hence the bishops and clergy in some parts of Ireland are in the habit of partaking of these birds on fast days without scruple. But in doing so they are led into sin, for if any one were to eat the leg of our first parent, although he (Adam) was not born of flesh, that person could not be adjudged innocent of eating flesh." Jews in the Middle Ages were divided whether these barnacle geese should be killed as