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 ignorance of 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. (See _Penny Cyclopædia_, article "Cirripeda," vii. 206, reversing the woodcut). The foot of the _Lepas Anatifera_ (Linn.), appeared 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. In France, the barnacle goose may be eaten on fast-days, by virtue of this old belief in its fishy origin. From a passage in the _Memoirs of Lady Fanshaw_, it appears that Sir Kenelm Digby, at the table of the Governor of Calais, declared that barnacles, a bird in Jersey, was first a shell-fish to appearance, and from that, sticking upon old wood, became in time a goose! An advertisement of June, 1807, sets forth that the "Wonderful curiosity called the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or Tree bearing geese, taken up at sea on the 12th January, 1807, by Captain Bytheway, and was more than twenty men could raise out of the water--may be seen at the Exhibition Rooms, Spring Gardens, from ten o'clock in the morning till ten at night, every day. The Barnacles which form the present exhibition possess a neck upwards of two feet in length, resembling the windpipe of a chicken; each shell contains five pieces, and notwithstanding the many thousands which hang to eight inches of the tree, part of the fowl may be seen from each shell. Sir Robert Moxay, in the _Wonders of Nature and Art_, speaking of this singularly curious production, says, that in every shell he opened he found a perfect sea-fowl[!], with a bill like that of a goose, feet like those of water-fowl, and the feathers all plainly formed." (_Ibid._, p. 300.) WARTS FROM WASHING IN EGG-WATER.