It is noteworthy that Giraldus does not state--in accordance with the tradition as reported by earlier writers--that there is a tree the buds of which become transformed into the geese, but says merely that the "small bodies of birds," clearly indicating by his description groups of ship's barnacles, are "produced from fir timber tossed along the sea." It is also noteworthy that he calls the geese themselves "Bernacæ," which is the Celtic name for a shell-fish. Later the belief seems to have reverted to the older tradition, or probably enough the complete story, including the existence of the bird-producing tree, existed in its original form in "seats of learning" in other parts of the British Islands outside Ireland, and also in Paris and other places in Western Europe. For we find that in 1435 the learned Sylvius, who afterwards became Pope Pius II, visited King James of Scotland in order, among other things, to see the wonderful tree which he had heard of as growing in Scotland from the fruit of which geese are born. He complains that "miracles will always flee further and further," for when he had now arrived in Scotland and asked to see the tree, he was told that it did not grow there, but farther north, in the Orkneys. And so he did not see the tree. In 1597, John Gerard, in the third book of his "Herbal, or History of Plants," writes as follows: "There are found in the north parts of Scotland and the Islands adjacent called Orchades, certaine trees whereon do grow certaine shell-fishes of a white colour tending to russett, wherein are contained little creatures which shels in time of maturity doe open and out of them grow those little living things which, falling into the water, doe become foules whom we call Barnacles, in the north of England Brent Geese, and in Lancashire Tree Geese." Gerard is here either adopting or suggesting an identification of the tradition of the tree which produces birds from its buds, with the floating timber bearing ship's barnacles, which were supposed to give birth to the brent geese. He does not say that he has seen, or knows persons who have seen, the barnacles attached to the branches of living trees. Nevertheless, he gives a picture of them so attached (Fig. 13). It has been suggested, in later times, that such a fixation of barnacles to the branches of living trees might occur in some of the sea-water lochs of the west of Scotland,--just as oysters become attached to the mangrove trees in the West Indies,--and it has further been suggested that willows might thus droop their branches into the sea-water, and that the catkins on the willow-shoots might be taken for an early stage of growth of the barnacles; but I have not come across any record of such fixation of barnacles on living shrubs or branches of trees, and I am inclined to think that Gerard's story of what occurs in the distant Orkneys is merely an attempt to substantiate