Soon after Gerarde’s death, Thomas Johnson, “Citizen and Apothecarie of London,” brought out another edition of the “Historie of Plants,” in which he adds the following note to Gerarde’s statement: “The Barnakles, whose fabulous breed my Author here sets downe and diuers others have also deliuered, were found by some Hollanders to haue another originall, and that by egges, as other birds have: for they in their third voyage to find out the North-East passage to China and Mollocos, found little islands, in the one of which they found an abundance of these geese sitting upon their egges, of which they got one goose and tooke away sixty egges.” Here again one can only feel that the explanation needs explaining, as it hardly seems necessary to sail for China to find the home of the birds that were to be had retail in any quantity on the Lancashire coast, for the by no means extravagant price of sixpence a brace. In a description of West Connaught by Roderic O’Flaherty, published in the year 1684, the barnacle is thus mentioned: “There is the bird engendered by the sea, out of timber long lying in the sea. Some call these birds Clakes and Solan’d geese, and some puffins, others barnacles.” And in the “Divine Weekes and Workes” of Du Bartas we find another reference:— “So Sly Bootes underneath him sees In y’ cycles, those goslings hatcht of trees, Whose fruitfull leaues falling into the water Are turn’d, they say, to liuing fowles soon after. So rotten sides of broken ships do change To barnacles! O transformation strange! ’Twas first a greene tree, then a gallant hull, Lately a mushroom, now a flying gull.” [Illustration: FIG. 16.] Another version of the barnacle-tree is given in fig. 16. We have extracted it from Parkinson’s “Theater of Plants,” a book that achieved considerable popularity and ran through several editions. Our own copy, from which we have reproduced the illustration, is dated 1640. Parkinson, we see, classes the barnacle-tree with “Marsh, Water, and Sea Plants, with Mosses and Mushrooms.” It seems curious that he should have inserted it at all, as his remarks thereupon are not at all those of a believer. “To finish this treatise of sea-plants,” he writes, “let me bring this admirable tale of untruth to your consideration, that whatever hath formerly been related concerning the breeding of these Barnakles to be from shels growing on trees is utterly erroneous, their breeding and hatching being found out by the Dutch and others, in their navigations to the Northward.” This second reference to the Dutch shows that the matter had caused some little stir outside England, and we may perhaps not too uncharitably assume that the foreigner did not feel altogether displeased when so great a British wonder was reduced to a very commonplace and everyday affair indeed.