flesh or fish. Pope Innocent III. took the view that they were flesh, for at the Lateran Council in 1215 he prohibited the eating of barnacle geese during Lent. In 1277 Rabbi Izaak of Corbeil forbade them altogether to Jews on the ground that they were neither fish nor flesh. Various localities were supposed to be the breeding places of these arboral geese. Gervasius of Tilbury (1211) says that they grew on the willows near the abbey of Faversham, and that the bird there was called Barneta. The Scottish historian Boece did not believe in them. In his work (1527), translated into Scottish in 1540 by John Bellenden, Archdeacon of Murray, he arrives at the conclusion that "the nature of the seis is mair relevant caus of their procreation than any other thyng." They were believed to exist on the shores of the Baltic (see Vincentius Bellovacensis (1190-1264) in Speculum Naturae), and in Flanders (see Jacob de Vitriaco, who died 1244).
Pope Pius II. when he was on a visit to James I. of Scotland was most anxious to see these geese, but he was told that they could only be seen in the Orkney Islands. Sebastian Munster,[1] who relates the foregoing, evidently believed in the myth himself, for he wrote of them: "In Scotland there are trees which produce fruit conglomerated of leaves and this fruit when in due time it falls into the water beneath it is endowed with new life and is converted into a living bird which they call the 'tree goose.' . . . Several old cosmographers, especially Saxo Grammaticus, mention the tree and it must not be regarded as fictitious as some new writers suppose." Even as early as the thirteenth century both Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon derided the myth. But in the centuries that followed it seems to have been accepted with unquestioning faith, with the notable exception of the Scottish historian Boece. Coming to later times we find that Caspar Schott (Physica Curiosa sive Mirabilia Naturae et Artis, 1662, lib. ix. cap.
- ↑ Cosmographia Universalis, p. 49. 1572.
