But, strange to say, if any painstaking enquirer, wishing to investigate the matter for himself, went to a locality where it was said the phenomenon regularly occurred, he was sure to find that he had literally, "started on a wild-goose chase," and had come to the wrong place. This was the experience of AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius II., who complained that miracles will always flee farther and farther away; for when he was on a visit (about 1430) to King James I., of Scotland,[88] and enquired after the tree which he most eagerly desired to see, he was told that it grew much farther north, in the Orkney Islands. [88] AEneas Sylvius gives us information concerning the personal appearance of his royal host, whom he describes as, "_hominem quadratum et multa pinguedine gravem_,"--literally, "a square-built man, heavy with much fat." Notwithstanding the suspicious fact that the prodigy receded like Will o' the Wisp, whenever it was persistently followed up, Sebastian Munster, who relates[89] the foregoing anecdote of AEneas Sylvius, appears to have entertained no doubt of the truth of the report, for he writes:-- [89] 'Cosmographia Universalis,' p. 49, 1572. [Illustration: FIG. 34.--THE GOOSE TREE. _Copied from Gerard's 'Herball,' 1st edition._[90]] [90] The original of this picture is a small wood-cut in Matthias de Lobel's 'Stirpium Historia,' published in 1870. The birds within the shells were added by Gerard. Aldrovandus, in copying it, gave leaves to the tree, as shown on page 110. "In Scotland there are trees which produce fruit, conglomerated of their leaves; and this fruit, when in due time it falls into the water beneath it, is endowed with new life, and is converted into a living bird, which they call the 'tree-goose.' This tree grows in the Island of Pomonia, which is not far from Scotland, towards the north. Several old cosmographers, especially Saxo Grammaticus, mention the tree, and it must not be regarded as fictitious, as some new writers suppose." Julius Caesar Scaliger[91] (1540) gives another reading of the legend, in which it is asserted that the leaves which fall from the tree into the water are converted into fishes, and those which fall upon the land become birds. [91] Exercit. 59, sect. 2.