Barnacles
An extraordinary belief was long current that the barnacle, which is found adhering to the bottom of ships, would, when broken off, become a species of goose. Several old writers assert this, and Holinshed gravely declares, that “with his own eyes he saw the feathers of these barnacles hang out of the shell at least two inches.” Giraldus Cambrensis gives similar ocular testimony. “Who,” he says, “can marvel that this should be so? When our first parent was made of mud, can we be surprised that a bird should be born of a tree?” The following lines occur in Isaac Walton’s quotations from “The Divine Weekes and Workes” of Du Bartas—
“So, Sly Boots, underneath him sees
In the cycles, those goslings hatcht of trees,
Whose fruitfull leaves falling into the water
Are turn’d (they say) to living fowls soon after.
So rotten sides of broken ships do change
To barnacles! O, transformation strange!
’Twas first a green tree, then a gallant hull,
Lately a mushroom, now a flying gull!”
In a description of West Connaught, Ireland, by Roderic O’Flaherty (1684), the barnacle is thus mentioned: “There is the bird engendered by the sea, out of timber long lying in the sea. Some call these birds clakes, and solan’d geese, and some puffins, others barnacles; we call them girrinn.” Butler tells us, in “Hudibras,” of those
“Who from the most refined of saints
As naturally grow miscreants,
As barnacles turn soland geese
In the islands of the Orcades.”
The numerous tentacles or arms of the animal inhabiting the barnacle shells, which are disposed in a semicircular form and have a feathery appearance, seem to have been all that could reasonably have been alleged in favor of this strange supposition.