have seen," he says, "and what our hands have touched, we shall declare. There is a small island in Lancashire, called the Pile of Foulders, wherein are found broken pieces of old ships, some whereof have been thrown thither by shipwracke, and also the trunks and bodies, with the branches of old and rotten trees cast up there likewise; whereon is found a certain spume or froth, that in time breedeth unto certaine shells, in shape like to those of the muskle, but sharper pointed, and of a whitish colour, wherein is contained a thing in forme like a lace of silke finely woven, as it were, together, of a whitish colour; one end whereof is fastned unto the inside of the shell, even as the fish of oisters and muskles are; the other end is made fast unto the belly of a rude mass, or lumpe, which, in time, commeth to the shape and forme of a bird. When it is perfectly formed, the shell gapeth open, and the first thing that appeareth is the foresaid lace or string; next come the legs of the bird hanging out, and as it groweth greater it openeth the shell by degrees, till at length it is all come forth, and hangeth onely by the bill; in short space after it commeth to full maturitie, and falleth into the sea, where it gathereth feathers, and groweth to a fowle bigger than a mallard and lesser than a goose, having blacke legs and bill or beake, and feathers blacke and white, spotted in such manner as is our magpie; called in some places a pie-annet, which the people of Lancashire call by no other name than tree-goose; which place aforesaid, and all those parts adjoyning, do so much abound therewith, that one of the best is bought for threepence. For the truth hereof, if any doubt, may it please them to repaire unto me, and I shall satisfie them by the testimonie of good witnesses. Martin assures us that he had seen many of these fowls in the shells, sticking to the trees by the bill, but acknowledges that he had never descried any of them with life upon the tree, though the natives [of the Orkney Isles] had seen them move in the heat of the sun. In the Cosmographiæ of Albioun,' Boëce (to whom we have before referred) considered the nature of the seas acting on old wood more relevant to the creation of barnacle or claik geese than anything else. "For," he says, "all trees that are cassin into the seas, by process of time appears at first worm-eaten, and in the small holes or bores thereof grows small worms. First they show their head and neck, and last of all they show their feet and wings. Finally, when they are come to the just measure and quantity of geese, they fly in the air, as other fowls wont, as was notably proven in the year of God one thousand four hundred and eighty in the sight of many people beside the castle of Pitslego." He then goes on to describe how a tree having been cast up by the sea, and split by saws, was found full of these geese, in different stages of their growth, some being "perfect shapen fowls;" and how the people," having ylk day this tree in more admiration," at length deposited it in the kirk of St. Andrew's, near Tyre." Among the more uninformed of the Scotch peasantry, there still exists a belief that the Soland goose, or gannet, and not the bernicle, grows by the bill on the cliffs of Bass, of Ailsa, and of St. Kilda. Giraldus traces the origin of these birds to the gelatinous drops of turpentine which appear on the branches of Fir-trees. "A tree that bears oysters is a very extraordinary thing,” remarks Bishop Fleetwood in his Curiosities of Agriculture and Gardening (1707), "but the Dominican Du Tertre, in his Natural History of Antego, assures us that he saw, at Guadaloupa, oysters growing on the branches of trees. These are his very words. The oysters are not larger than the little English oysters, that is to say, about the size of a crown piece. They stick to the branches that hang in the water of a tree called Paretuvier. No doubt the seed of the oysters, which is shed in the tree when they spawn, cleaves to those branches, so that the oysters form themselves there, and grow bigger in process of time, and by their weight bend down the branches into the sea, and then are refreshed twice a day by the flux and reflux of it." The Oyster-bearing Tree, however, is not the only marvel of which the good Bishop has left a record: he tells us that near the island Cimbalon there lies another, where grows a tree whose leaves, as they fall off, change into animals: they are no sooner on the ground, than they begin to walk like a hen, upon two little legs. Pigafetta says that he kept one of these leaves eight days in a porringer; that it took itself to walking as soon as he touched it; and that it lived only upon the air." Scaliger, speaking of these very leaves, remarks, as though he had been an eye-witness, that they walk, and march away without further ado if anyone attempts to touch them. Bauhin, after describing these wonderful leaves as being very like Mulberry-leaves, but with two short and pointed feet on each side, remarks upon the great prodigy of the leaf of a tree being changed into an animal, obtaining sense, and being capable of progressive motion. Kircher records that in his time a tree was said to exist in Chili, the leaves of which produced worms; upon arriving at maturity, these worms crawled to the edge of the leaf, and thence fell to the earth, where after a time they became changed into serpents, which over-ran the whole land. Kircher endeavours to explain this story of the serpent-bearing tree by giving, as a reason for the phenomenon, that the tree attached to itself, through its roots, moisture pregnant with the seed of serpents. Through the action of the sun's rays, and the moisture of the tree, this serpent-spawn degenerates into worms, which by contact with the earth become converted into living serpents. The same authority states that in the Molucca islands, but more particularly in Ternate, not far from the castle of the same name, there grew a plant which he describes as having small leaves. To this plant the natives gave the name of Catopa, because when its leaves fall off they at once become changed into butterflies. Doctor Darwin, in his botanical poem called The Loves of the Plants,' thus apostrophises an extraordinary animal-bearing plant : 66 66 Cradled in snow and fanned by Arctic air, In the curious frontispiece to Parkinson's Paradisus,' which will be found reproduced at the commencement of this work, it will be noticed that the Barometz, or Vegetable Lamb, is represented as one of the plants growing in Eden. In Zahn's Specula PhysicoMathematico-Historica (1696) is given a figure of this plant, accompanied by a description, of which the following is a translation:Very wonderful is the Tartarian shrub or plant which the natives call Boromez, i.e., Lamb. It grows like a lamb to about the height of three feet. It resembles a lamb in feet, in hoofs, in ears, and in the whole head, save the horns. For horns, it possesses tufts of hair, resembling a horn in appearance. It is covered with the thinnest bark, which is taken off and used by the inhabitants for the protection of their heads. They say that the inner pulp resembles lobster-flesh, and that blood flows from it when it is wounded. Its root projects and rises to the umbilicus. What |