As early as the thirteenth century, Albertus Magnus expressed his disbelief in the stories of birds propagated from trees, yet there were not wanting writers who professed to have been eye-witnesses of the marvels they recounted respecting Bernicle or Claik Geese. Some of these witnesses, however, asserted that the birds grew on living trees, while others traced them to timber rotted in the sea, or boughs of trees which had fallen therein. Boëce, who favoured the latter theory, writes that “because the rude and ignorant people saw oft-times the fruit that fell off the trees (which stood near the sea) converted within a short time into geese, they believed that yir-geese grew upon the trees, hanging by their nebbis [bills] such like as Apples and other fruits hangs by their stalks, but their opinion is nought to be sustained. For as soon as their Apples or fruit falls off the tree into the sea-flood, they grow first worm-eaten, and by short process of time are _altered_ into geese.” Munster, in his ‘Cosmographie,’ remembers that in Scotland “are found trees which produce fruit rolled up in leaves, and this, in due time, falling into water, which it overhangs, is converted into a living bird, and hence the tree is called the Goose-tree. The same tree grows in the island of Pomona. Lest you should imagine that this is a fiction devised by modern writers, I may mention that all cosmographists, particularly Saxo Grammaticus, take notice of this tree.” Prof. Rennie says that Montbeillard seems inclined to derive the name of Pomona from its being the orchard of these goose-bearing trees. Fulgosus depicts the trees themselves as resembling Willows, “as those who had seen them in Ireland and Scotland” had informed him. To these particulars, Bauhin adds that, if the leaves of this tree fall upon the land, they become birds; but if into the water, then they are transmuted into fishes. Maundevile speaks of the Barnacle-tree as a thing known and proved in his time. He tells us, in his book, that he narrated to the somewhat sceptical inhabitants of Caldilhe how that “in oure contre weren trees that beren a fruyt that becomen briddes fleiynge: and thei that fallen on the erthe dyen anon: and thei ben right gode to mannes mete.” Aldrovandus gives a woodcut of these trees, in which the foliage resembles that of Myrtles, while the strange fruit is large and heart-shaped. [Illustration: [TO FACE PAGE 118. The Barnacle or Goose Tree. _From ‘Aldrovandi Ornithologia.’_]