Drayton (1613) in his _Poly-olbion_, iii., in connexion with the river Dee,
speaks of--
"Th' anatomised fish, and fowls from planchers sprung,"
to which a note is appended in Southey's edition, p. 609., that such fowls
were "_barnacles_, a bird breeding upon old ships." In the _Entertaining
Library_, "Habits of Birds," pp. 363-379., the whole story of this
extraordinary instance of ignorance in natural history is amply developed.
The barnacle shells which I once saw in a sea-port, attached to a vessel
just arrived from the Mediterranean, had the brilliant appearance, at a
distance, of flowers in bloom[1]; the foot of the _Lepas anatifera_
(Linnæus) appearing to me like the stalk of a plant growing from the ship's
side: the shell had the semblance of a calyx, and the flower consisted of
the fingers (_tentacula_) of the shell-fish, "of which twelve project in an
elegant curve, and are used by it for making prey of small fish." The very
ancient error was to mistake the foot of the shell-fish for the neck of a
goose, the shell for its head, and the _tentacula_ for a tuft of feathers.
As to the body, _non est inventus_. The Barnacle Goose is a well-known
bird: and these shell-fish, bearing, as seen out of the water, resemblance
to the goose's neck, were ignorantly, and without investigation, confounded
with geese themselves, an error into which Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) did
not fall, and in which Pope Pius II. proved himself infallible.
Nevertheless, in France, the Barnacle Goose may be eaten on fast-days by
virtue of this old belief in its marine origin.