An extensive clerical literature grew up in Europe in discussion of the ethics of this matter, for the monks liked good eating and their Lenten fare was miserably scanty, and a great variety of explanations of the alleged marine birth of these birds—ordinary geese (_Branta bernicla_) when mature—were contrived. That something of the kind was true nobody in authority denied down to the middle of the 17th century, when a German Jesuit, Gaspar Schott, was bold enough to declare that although the birth-place of this uncommon species of goose was unknown (it is now believed to breed in Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla), undoubtedly it was produced from incubated eggs like any other goose. Nevertheless the fable was reaffirmed in the _Philosophical Transactions_ of the Scottish Royal Society for 1677. Henry Lee[36] recalls two versions of the absurd but prevalent theory. One is that certain trees, resembling willows, and growing always close to the sea, produced at the ends of their branches fruits in the shape of apples, each containing the embryo of a goose, which, when the fruit was ripe, fell into the water and flew away. The other is that the geese were bred from a fungus growing on rotten timber floating at sea, and were first developed in the form of worms in the substance of the wood.
It is plain that this fable sprang from the similitude to the wings of tiny birds of the feathery arms that sessile barnacles reach out from their shells to clutch from the water their microscopic food, and also to the remote likeness the naked heads and necks of young birds bear to stalked or “whale” barnacles (Lepas). Both these cirripeds are found attached to floating wood, and sometimes to tree-branches exposed to waves and to high tides. The deception so agreeable to hungry churchmen was abetted by the etymologies in the older dictionaries. Dr. Murray, editor of _The New Oxford Dictionary_, asserts, however, that the origin of the word “barnacle” is not known, but that certainly it was applied to the mature goose before its was given to the cirriped.
Speaking of geese, what is the probable source of the warning “Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs” beyond or behind the obvious moral of Æsop’s familiar fable? The only light on the subject that has come to me is the following passage in Bayley’s[24] somewhat esoteric book: