In the fourteenth century, an Italian voyager, Odoricus du Frioul, on arriving at Malabar, heard the natives speaking of trees which, instead of fruit, bore men and women: these creatures were scarcely a yard high, and their nether extremities were attached to the tree’s trunk, like branches. Their bodies were fresh and radiant when the wind blew, but on its dropping, they became gradually withered and dried up. In the first book of the _Mahâbhârata_, reference is made, in the legend of Garuda, to an enormous Indian Fig-tree (_Ficus religiosa_), from the branches of which are suspended certain devotees of dwarfed proportions, called _Vâlakhilyas_. Among the Arabs, there exists a tradition of an island in the Southern Ocean called Wak-Wak, which is so-named because certain trees growing thereon produce fruit having the form of a human head, which cries _Wak! Wak!_ Among the Chinese, the myth of men being descended from trees is reversed, for we find a legend current in the Flowery Land that, in the beginning, the herbs and plants sprang from the hairs of a cosmic giant. The Chinese, however, preserve the tradition of a certain lake by whose margin grew great quantities of trees, the leaves of which when developed became changed into birds. In India, similar trees are referred to in many of the popular tales: thus, in “The Rose of Bakavali” mention is made of a garden of Pomegranate-trees, the fruit of which resembled earthenware vases. When these were plucked and opened, out hopped birds of beautiful plumage, which immediately flew away. Pope Pius II., in his work on Asia and Europe, published towards the end of the fifteenth century, states that in Scotland there grew on the banks of a river a tree which produced fruits resembling ducks; these fruits, when matured, fell either on the river bank or into the water: those which fell on the ground perished instantly; those which fell into the water became turned at once into ducks, acquired plumage, and then flew off. His Holiness remarks that he had been unable to obtain any proof of this wondrous tree existing in Scotland, but that it was to be found growing in the Orkney Isles.