Jordanus brought back from India the story of “certain birds which are called Roc, that are so big that they easily carry an elephant into the air.” He did not himself see one of these, the nearest he is able to approach to this being, “I have seen a certain person who said that he had seen one of these birds.” The Roc was said to lay an egg equal in bulk to one hundred and forty-eight hen’s eggs. The precision of this estimate should disarm criticism: one feels in face of it that to have said one hundred and fifty would have been a fatal yielding to the charm of round numbers and a palpable exaggeration. Mr. Lane refers to an Arab, one Ibou el Wardee, for authority for the statement that Rocs are found in an island in the Chinese Sea that have each wing ten thousand fathoms long.[75] These birds find no difficulty in carrying an eagle in their beak, plus two others in their talons. Wardee also knew of a Roc’s egg, or said he did—which is, perhaps, not quite the same thing—on one of these islands that looked like an enormous white dome over a hundred cubits high and as firm as a mountain. Many of the beliefs of our forefathers had a refreshing quaintness about them, and one of the quaintest, perhaps, of these was the notion that a particular kind of goose sprang from the barnacles that cluster in salt water on submerged wood. Butler, in his “Hudibras,” tells of those “Who from the most refined of saints As naturally turn miscreants As barnacles turn Soland geese In the islands of the Orcades.” [Illustration: FIG. 15.]