to which a note is appended in Southey's edition, p. 609, that such fowls were "Barnacles, a bird breeding upon old ships." A bunch of the shells attached to the ship, or to a piece of floating timber, at a distance appears like flowers in bloom; the foot of the animal has a similitude to the stalk of a plant growing from the ship's sides, the shell resembles a calyx, and the flower consists of the tentacula, or fingers, of the shell-fish. The ancient error was to mistake the foot for the neck of a goose, the shell for its head, and the tentacula for feathers. As to the body, _non est inventus_. Sir Kenelm Digby was soundly laughed at for relating to a party at the castle of the Governor of Calais, that "the Barnacle, a bird in Jersey, was first a shell-fish to appearance, and, from that striking upon old wood, became in time a bird." In 1807, there was exhibited in Spring-gardens, London, a "Wonderful natural curiosity, called the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or Tree bearing Geese," taken up at sea on January 12th, and more than twenty men could raise out of the water.[26] Sir J. Emerson Tennent asks whether the ready acceptance and general credence given to so obvious a fable may not have been derived from giving too literal a construction to the text of the passage in the first chapter of Genesis:-- "And God said, Let the _waters bring forth abundantly_ the moving creature that hath life, and the _fowl_ that may fly in the open firmament of heaven." The Barnacle Goose is a well-known bird, and is eaten on fast-days in France, by virtue of this old belief in its marine origin. The belief in the barnacle origin of the bird still prevails on the west coast of Ireland, and in the Western Highlands of Scotland.