Belmont.
As a tail-piece to the curious information communicated respecting these
strange creatures in Vol. i., pp. 117. 169. 254. 340., Vol. viii., pp. 124.
223., may be added an advertisement, extracted from the monthly compendium
annexed to _La Belle Assemblee_, or Bell's _Court and Fashionable
Magazine_, for June, 1807, in the following terms:
"Wonderful natural curiosity, called the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or
Tree bearing Geese, taken up at sea, on the 12th of January, 1807, by
Captain Bytheway, and was more than twenty men could raise out of the
water, which may be seen at the Exhibition Rooms, Spring Gardens, from
ten o'clock in the morning till ten at night, every day. Admission, one
shilling; children half-price.
"The Barnacles which form the present Exhibition, possess a neck
upwards of two feet in length, resembling the windpipe of a chicken;
each shell contains five pieces, and notwithstanding the many thousands
which hang to eight inches of the tree, part of the fowl may be seen
from each shell. Sir Robert Moxay, in the Wonders of Nature and Art,
speaking of this singularly curious production, says, in every shell he
opened he found a perfect sea-fowl, with a bill like that of a goose,
feet like those of water-fowl, and the feathers all plainly formed.
"The above wonderful and almost indescribable curiosity, is the only
exhibition of the kind in the world."
[mu].
* * * * *
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