“With respect to the feathers with which the Scythians say the air is filled, and on account of which it is not possible either to see further upon the continent, or to pass through it, I entertain the following opinion. In the upper parts of this country it continually snows--less in summer than in winter, as is reasonable. Now, whoever has seen snow falling thick near him will know what I mean; for snow is like feathers, and on account of the winter being so severe the northern parts of this country are uninhabited. I think, then, that the Scythians and their neighbours call the snow feathers, comparing them together.” Herodotus was, of course, right in this interpretation. Who can doubt that the people who would thus realistically describe snow as feathers would probably describe the white wool of the cotton-pod as “tree-lamb’s-wool,” the produce of a “lamb-plant,” or “plant-lamb”? The growth and development of the story of “the Scythian Lamb” from the similarity of appearance of two really different objects may be best explained by comparing it with another Natural-history myth, which ran curiously parallel with it. I allude to the fable that Sir John Mandeville tells us he related to his Tartar acquaintances, viz. that of the “_Barnacle Geese_”--which has never been surpassed as a specimen of ignorant credulity and persistent error. From the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth century it was implicitly and almost universally believed that in the Western Islands of Scotland certain geese, of which the nesting-places were never found, instead of being hatched from eggs, like other birds, were bred from “shell-fish” which grew on trees. Upon the shores where these geese abounded, pieces of timber and old trunks of trees covered with barnacles were often seen which had been stranded by the sea. From between the partly opened shells of the barnacles protruded their plumose cirrhi, which in some degree resemble the feathers of a bird. Hence arose the belief that they contained real birds. The fishermen persuaded themselves that these birds within the shells were the geese whose origin they had been previously unable to discover, and that they were thus bred, instead of being hatched, like other birds, from eggs. As the tale spread to a distance, it gained by repetition, like the story of “The Three Black Crows” amusingly told by Dr. John Byrom.[33] The trees found upon the shore were soon reported to be trees growing on the shore; that which grew on trees people soon asserted to be the fruit of trees; and thus, from step to step, the story increased in wonder and obtained credit. It was discussed during many centuries by philosophers and men of learning, who, one after another, accepted the evidence in its favour, until Sir Robert Moray, F.R.S., in 1678, reported to the Royal Society that he had examined these barnacles, and that in every shell that he had opened he had “found a little bird--the little bill, like that of a goose; the