[83] 'Historia Simplicium,' lib. iii. p. 327.
[84] Prodrom. Hist. Nat. Scot. parts 2, lib. iii. p. 21, 1684.
Professor Max Müller says that in Brittany, Barnacle geese are still allowed to be eaten on Fridays, and that the Roman Catholic Bishop of Ferns may give permission to people out of his diocese to eat these birds at his table.
In Bombay, also, where fish is prohibited as food to some classes of the population, the priests call this goose a "sea-vegetable," under which name it is allowed to be eaten.
Various localities were mentioned as the breeding-places of these arboreal geese. Gervasius of Tilbury,[85] writing about 1211, describes the process of their generation in full detail, and says that great numbers of them grew in his time upon the young willow trees which abounded in the neighbourhood of the Abbey of Faversham, in the county of Kent, and within the Archiepiscopate of Canterbury. The bird was there commonly called the _Barneta_.
Hector Boethius, or Boece, the old Scottish historian, combats this version of the story. His work, written in Latin, in 1527, was translated into quaint Scottish in 1540, by John Bellenden, Archdeacon of Murray. In his fourteenth chapter, "Of the nature of claik geis, and of the syndry maner of thair procreatioun, and of the ile of Thule," he says:--
"Restis now to speik of the geis generit of the see namit clakis. Sum men belevis that thir clakis growis on treis be the nebbis. Bot thair opinioun is vane. And becaus the nature and procreatioun of thir clakis is strange we have maid na lytyll laubore and deligence to serche ye treuth and verite yairof, we have salit throw ye seis quhare thir clakis ar bred, and I fynd be gret experience, that the nature of the seis is mair relevant caus of thir procreatioun than ony uther thyng."
From the circumstances attending the finding of "ane gret tree that was brocht be alluvion and flux of the see to land, in secht of money pepyll besyde the castell of Petslego, in the yeir of God ane thousand iiii. hundred lxxxx, and of a see tangle hyngand full of mussill schellis," brought to him by "Maister Alexander Galloway, person of Kynkell," who knowing him to be "richt desirus of sic uncouth thingis came haistely with the said tangle," he arrives at the conclusion, by a process of reasoning highly satisfactory and convincing to himself, that,