CHAPTER XV

MORE AS TO THE BARNACLE AND THE GOOSE

IT is clear that there was a widespread tradition known to the learned in the early centuries of the Christian era, according to which there existed in some distant Eastern land a tree which bore buds or fruits which became converted into birds. Connected with this, and perhaps really a part of it, there existed a tradition that marine "barnacles" gave birth to geese from within their shells, or are in some way converted into geese. The two stories were in some localities and narrations combined, though in others they were distinct. On the coast of Ireland the early missionaries of the Church (learned men acquainted with the traditions of their time) identified the migratory brent goose with the bird said to be produced by the barnacle; and elsewhere, on the Scottish coast, the barnacles were (it was reported) found growing on trees. There is no such resemblance between barnacles and brent geese as to have suggested to the Irish monks the regular and natural conversion of one into the other. It seems most probable that the learned churchmen knew the traditional story already before arriving in Ireland, and applied it to the barnacles and the geese which they discovered around them. Eventually the word "barnacle" without qualification was applied to the geese, as we see in Gerard's account given in the last chapter. Is there, it may be asked, anything further known as to such a tradition, and the place and manner of its origin? In the absence of such knowledge, an ingenious attempt was made by my old friend, Professor Max Müller, to account for the tradition by the similarity of the names, which he erroneously supposed had been given _independently_ to the barnacle and to the "Hibernian" goose. I will refer to this below, but now I will proceed to give the most probable solution of the mystery as to the tradition of the tree, the goose, and the barnacle. Its discovery is not more than twenty years old, and is due to M. Frederic Houssay, a distinguished French zoologist of the Ecole Normale, who published it in the "Revue Archeologique" in 1895. It has not hitherto been brought to the notice of English readers, and I shall therefore give a full account of it.

The solution is as follows: The Mykenæan population of the islands of Cyprus and Crete, in the period 800 to 1000 years before Christ, were great makers of pottery, and painted large earthernware basins and vases with a variety of decorative representations of marine life, of fishes, butterflies, birds, and trees. Some of these are to be seen in the British Museum at Bloomsbury, where I examined them a few years ago. Others have been figured by the well-known archæologists, MM. Perrot and Chipiez, in the sixth volume of their work, "L'Ossuaire de Crète." M. Perrot consulted M. Houssay, in his capacity of zoologist, in regard to these Mykenæan drawings, which bear, as M. Houssay states, the evidence of having been designed _after nature_ by one who knew the things in life, although they are not slavishly "copied" from nature. These early Mykenæan painters on pottery were members of a community who worshipped the great mother--"Nature"--as Astarte or Aphrodite risen from the foam of the sea. Being sailors and fishermen, marine life was even more familiar to them than that of the land, and they placed little models of sea animals as votive offerings in the temples of the great mother, and also honoured her in decorating their pottery with marine creatures. The little fish, Hippocampus, called the sea-horse, the sea-urchin, the octopus, the argonaut and its floating cradle, the sea-anemone, and the butterfly-like Pteropod, were subjects used by these artists for which they found terrestrial counterparts. The sea-horse was convertible decoratively into a true horse, with intermediate phases imagined by the artists; the sea-urchin into a hedgehog, the sea-anemone into a flower, and the Pteropod into a true butterfly. These artists loved to exercise a little fancy and ingenuity. By gradual reduction in the number and size of outstanding parts--a common rule in the artistic "schematizing" or "conventional simplification" of natural form--they converted the octopus and the argonaut, with their eight arms, into a bull's head with a pair of spiral horns (Fig. 14). In the same spirit it seems that they observed and drew the barnacle floating on timber or thrown up after a storm on their shores. They detected a resemblance in the marking of its shells to the plumage of a goose, whilst in the curvature of its stalk they saw a resemblance to the long neck of the bird. The barnacle's jointed plumose legs or cirri and other details suggested points of agreement with the feathers of the bird. They brought the barnacle and the goose together, not guided thereto by any pre-existing legend, but by a simple and not uncommon artistic desire to follow up a superficial suggestion of similarity and to conceive of intermediate connecting forms. Some of their fanciful drawings with this purpose are shown in Figs. 15, 16, and 17. These (excepting the drawing of the barnacle lying within its opened shell) are copied from M. Houssay's paper on the subject, and were taken from the work of M. Perrot on Cretan pottery.

The intention of the artist to fantastically insist on intermediate phases between goose and barnacle is placed beyond doubt by certain details. For instance, in Fig. 16, the little jointed processes on the back of the goose marked a, correspond in position to the cirri or legs of the barnacle. They are reduced in number to two, and simplified in form so as to pass for the tips of the wings of the goose. The goose's own feet are represented in their natural position. The most extraordinary piece of resemblance in detail is that given in Fig. 15, B, which is a copy of a very much "barnaculized" goose from one of these ancient dishes. What does the Mykenæan artist mean to represent by the strange single leg-like limb marked pe? When we carefully examine the barnacle's soft body concealed by its shell, it becomes obvious that this leg-like thing corresponds to the single stalk-like body, ending in a bunch of a few hairs which is marked pe in Fig. 15, C. This last-named figure is a careful modern representation of the soft living barnacle, as seen when the shells of one side are removed. The cylindrical body pe of Fig. 15, C, which is drawn by the Mykenæan artist on an exaggerated scale in Fig. 15, B, is the external opening of the seminal duct of the barnacle. It is remarkable that the Mykenæan pottery-painter had observed the soft "fish" of the barnacle so minutely as to select this unpaired and very peculiar-looking structure, and represent it of exaggerated size attached in its proper position on the barnacle-like body of a goose. This very striking transference of a peculiar and characteristic organ of the barnacle to the body of the goose by the artist seems not to have been noticed by M. Houssay.

M. Houssay further points out the existence on some of the Mykenæan pottery of drawings (see "L'Ossuaire de Crète," by MM. Perrot and Chipiez) of leaves attached to tree-like stems. These leaves (Fig. 18, a, b, c) exhibit the same markings ("venation") which we see on the bodies of the geese in Fig. 16, especially the middle one of the five. The leaves (or fruits?) copied by M. Houssay from the Mykenæan pottery are attached in a series to a stem--but no one, at present, has suggested what plant it is which is represented. The corners of the leaf or fruit to the right and left of its stalk are thrown into a spiral--and the half leaf or half fruit represented in Fig. 18, b, leads us on to that drawn in Fig. 18, c, in which the spiral corner is slightly modified in curvature so as to resemble the head and neck of the goose as drawn in Fig. 16. Though Fig. 18, c, is as yet devoid of legs or wing feathers (compare Fig. 16, d), the black band along the belly with the band of vertical markings above it agrees closely with the design on the body of the middle goose of the series drawn in Fig. 16. As these are associated in the decoration of the Mykenæan artists, it is fairly evident that the intention has been to manipulate the drawing of the leaf or fruit so as to make it resemble the drawing of the goose, whilst that in its turn is modified so as to emphasize or idealize its points of resemblance to a barnacle.

It is true enough that the drawings from Mykenæan pots here submitted cannot be considered as a complete demonstration that the legend of the tree-goose originated with these drawings. But it must be remembered that we have only a small number of examples of this pottery surviving from a thousand years B.C. It is probable that the fanciful decorative design of a master artist was copied and used in the painting of hundreds of pots by mere workmen or inferior craftsmen, and that more complete and impressive designs showing the fanciful transformation of leaf or fruit to goose, and of goose to barnacle, existed both before and after the making of the particular pots and jars which have come down to us. The supposition made by M. Houssay (which I entirely support) is that some later Levantine people--to whom these decorated pots or copies of their decorations became known either in the regular way of trade or as sailors' "curios"--were led to attempt an explanation of the significance of the pictures drawn upon them, and in accordance with a well-known and rooted tendency--interpreted the fancies of the artist as careful representations of astonishing fact. The existence of a tree which produces buds which become birds, and of a barnacle which becomes transformed into a goose--is the matter-of-fact interpretation of the few pictures of these animals which have come down to us, modern men, painted on the few pots of that remote Mykenæan industry now in our museums. It is not at all unlikely that in the vast period of time between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the more striking of these designs had been copied and familiarized in some part of the ancient world. It is true that we do not at present know in what part: we have not yet come across these designs of later date than 800 B.C. The absence of the story of the tree-goose from Greek and Roman lore is striking. Neither Aristotle nor Herodotus knew of it, although it has been erroneously stated that they refer to it. Yet the source of it was there in the Greek isles almost under their noses (if one may speak of the noses of such splendid and worshipful men of old) in the artistic work--otherwise not unknown to the Greeks--of a civilization which preceded their own by hundreds of years. There is other and ample evidence--as for instance that of the representation of the "flying gallop" (see "Science from an Easy Chair," Second Series, pp. 57 and 63), showing that Mykenæan art had little or no direct effect on the Hellenes, although the reputation of the skill of the old race in metal work came through many generations to them. Mykenæan art seems to have migrated with Mykenæan settlers to the remote region of the Caucasus. In the necropolis of Koban and other remote settlements, Mykenæan designs in bronze and gold--including the horse in flying gallop and octopods transformed to bull's heads--have been found and pictured (Ernest Chantre, "Recherches anthropologique dans Caucase," 4 vols.: Paris, 1886). They are believed to date from 500 B.C. It is possible that in such remote regions or in some of the Greek islands the pictures of the tree-goose and the barnacle may have survived until the new dispensation--that is, until the days of the Byzantine Empire. Once we can trace either the pictures or the legend up to that point, there is no difficulty about admitting the radiation of the wonderful story from that centre to the Jews of the Kabbalah, to Arabic writers, and so to the learned men of the Christian Church and the seats of learning throughout Europe and a great part of Asia.

Of the history of the legend during two thousand years we have no actual knowledge. It remains for investigation. But undoubtedly these Mykenæan pottery paintings remove the origin of the story to a period two thousand years older than that of the Irish monks.

One additional fact I may mention as to the existence of the goose and barnacle legend in the East. I am informed that in Java there is, according to "native" story, a shell-fish the animal of which becomes transformed into a bird--said to be a kind of snipe--and flies from the shell. I have been shown the shell by a Dutch lady who has lived in Java. It is a large fresh-water mussel, one of the Unionidæ. I have failed to obtain, after inquiry, any further information as to the prevalence or origin of this story in Java, and hope that some one who reads this page may be able to help me.

Before leaving the story of the goose and the barnacle, the explanation of the myth given by Prof. Max Müller in his lectures on the science of language nearly fifty years ago, should be cited. It is an excellent example of the misuse of hypothesis in investigation, and the attempt to explain something which we cannot get at and examine by making a supposition which it is even more difficult to examine and test.

Max Müller made use of the observation--a perfectly true and interesting one--that a whole people or folk will be led to a wrong conclusion, or to a belief in some strange and marvellous occurrence, by the misunderstanding of a single word, attributing to that word a sense which now fits the sound, but one quite different from that with which the word was originally used in the tradition or history concerned. Words are, in fact, misinterpreted after a lapse of time, or when imported from distant lands, just as we have seen that pictures and sculpture often have been. For instance, Richard Whittington, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1398 and other later years, did business in French goods, which was spoken of in the city as "achat," and pronounced "akat." Hence in later centuries, when the prevalence of Norman French was forgotten, it was stated (in a play produced in 1605) that Whittington owed his fortune to "a cat," and the story of the wonderful cat and its deeds was built up "line upon line" or "lie upon lie." Max Müller suggested that the story of the barnacle and the goose could be similarly explained. The brant or brent goose which frequents the Irish shore was, he supposes, called "berniculus" by the Latin-speaking clergy as a diminutive of Hibernicus, meaning "Irish." There is absolutely no evidence to support this. Max Müller supposes that Hibernicus became "Hiberniculus," and then dropping the first syllable became "Berniculus," and that this word was applied to the "Irish goose." It might have been, but there is nothing to show that it was. Meanwhile the ship's barnacle and other sea-shells were called in the Celtic tongue "barnagh," "berniche," or "bernak," and the hermit-crab is still called on the Breton coast, "Bernard l'hermite," a modification of "bernak l'hermite." There is no doubt that the word "barnacle" as applied to the stalked shell-fish growing on ships' bottoms is a diminutive of the Celtic word "bernak," or "barnak." It became in Latin "barnacus," and then the diminutive "barnaculus," and so "barnacle" was used for the little stalked shell-fish encrusting old timber. According to Max Müller, later generations thus found the two animals, goose and shell-fish, called by the same name, "bernikle," or "barnacle." "Why?" they would ask: and then (he supposes) they would compare the two and detect points of resemblance, until at last a very devout and astute monk had the happy thought of declaring that the Hibernian goose was called "berniculus," or "barnak-goose," _because_ it did not breed from eggs as other birds do, but is hatched out of the shell of the shell-fish, also very naturally and rightly called "berniculus," or barnak, as any one may see by carefully examining the fish contained in the shell of the barnacle or little stalked "barnak," which has the complete form of a bird. Since, however, it is not a bird, but a fish in nature and origin, this holy man declared that the "berniculus," or "barnacle-goose," may be eaten on fast days. Max Müller's explanation of the origin of the story is too adventurous in its unsupported assumption that the particular goose associated with the story was peculiarly Irish, or that, in fact, any kind of goose was so. He also put aside the evidence of Father Damien (earlier than the Irish story of Giraldus) referring the goose-tree to an island in the Indies, and the report cited in the Oriental book the "Zohar." However plausible Max Müller's theory may have appeared, it absolutely crumbles and disappears in the presence of the Mykenæan pictures of "barnaculized" geese, and trees budding birds--two thousand years older than the Irish record, and nearly three thousand years earlier than the essay of the charming and persuasive professor.