head, feet, and wings, but they had no feathers; some of them were
perfect shapen fowls. At last, the people having this tree each day in
more admiration, brought it to the kirk of St. Andrew's, beside the town
of Tyre, where it yet remains to our day."
Du Bartas thus describes the various transformations of this bird:--
"So, slowe Boôtes underneath him sees,
In th' ycie iles, those goslings hatcht of trees;
Whose fruitful leaves, falling into the water,
Are turn'd, they say, to living fowls soon after.
So, rotten sides of broken ships do change
To barnacles; O transformation change,
'Twas first a green tree, then a gallant hull,
Lately a mushroom, now a flying gull."
Meyer wrote a treatise on this strange "bird without father or
mother," and Sir Robert Murray, in the "Philosophical Transactions," says
that, "these shells are hung at the tree by a neck, longer than the shell, of
a filmy substance, round and hollow and creased, not unlike the
windpipe of a chicken, spreading out broadest where it is fastened to the
tree, from which it seems to draw and convey the matter which serves
for the growth and vegetation of the shell and the little bird within it. In
every shell that I opened," he adds, "I found a perfect sea-fowl; the little
bill like that of a goose, the eyes marked; the head, neck, breast, wing,
tail, and feet formed; the feathers everywhere perfectly shaped, and the
feet like those of other water-fowl." The Chinese have a tradition of
certain trees, the leaves of which were finally changed into birds.
With this story may be compared that of the oyster-bearing tree,
which Bishop Fleetwood describes in his "Curiosities of Agriculture and
Gardening," written in the year 1707. The oysters as seen, he says, by the
Dominican Du Tertre, at Guadaloupe, grew on the branches of trees,
and, "are not larger than the little English oysters, that is to say, about the
size of a crown-piece. They stick to the branches that hang in the water of
a tree called Paretuvier. No doubt the seed of the oysters, which is shed
in the tree when they spawn, cleaves to those branches, so that the
oysters form themselves there, and grow bigger in process of time, and
by their weight bend down the branches into the sea, and then are
refreshed twice a day by the flux and reflux of it." Kircher speaks of a
tree in Chili, the leaves of which brought forth a certain kind of worm,
which eventually became changed into serpents; and describes a plant
which grew in the Molucca Islands, nicknamed "catopa," on account of
its leaves when falling off being transformed into butterflies.