picture represents a group of
stalked barnacles--those shrimps fixed by their antennae, which modern
science, I believe, calls _Lepas anatifera_; by the side of these
stands a little goose, and the suggestion of course is that the latter
has slipped out of the former, although the draughtsman has been far
too conscientious to represent the occurrence. Yet the letterpress is
confident that in the north parts of Scotland there are trees on which
grow white shells, which ripen, and then, opening, drop little living
geese into the waves below. Gerard himself avers that from Guernsey
and Jersey he brought home with him to London shells, like limpets,
containing little feathery objects, "which, _no doubt_, were the fowls
called Barnacles." It is almost needless to say that these objects
really were the plumose and flexible _cirri_ which the barnacles
throw out to catch their food with, and which lie, like a tiny
feather-brush, just within the valves of the shell, when the creature
is dead. Gerard was plainly unable to refuse credence to the mass of
evidence which presented itself to him on this subject, yet he closes
with a hint that this seems rather a "fabulous breed" of geese.

With the Barnacle Goose Tree the Herbal proper closes, in these quaint
words:

"And thus having, through God's assistance, discoursed somewhat
at large of grasses, herbs, shrubs, trees and mosses, and certain
excrescences of the earth, with other things moe, incident to the
history thereof, we conclude, and end our present volume with this
wonder of England. For the which God's name be ever honoured and
praised."

And so, at last, the Goose Tree receives the highest sanction.

PHARAMOND

PHARAMOND; or, _The History of France. A New Romance. In four
parts. Written originally in French, by the Author of Cassandra and
Cleopatra: and now elegantly rendered into English. London: Printed by
Ja: Cottrell for Samuel Speed, at the Rain-Bow in Fleetstreet, near
the Inner Temple-Gate. (Folio_.) 1662.

There is no better instance of the fact that books will not live by
good works alone than is offered by the utterly neglected heroic
novels of the seventeenth century. At the opening of the reign of
Louis XIV. in France, several writers, in the general dearth of prose
fiction, began to supply the public in Paris with a series of long
romances, which for at least a generation absorbed the attention of
the ladies and reigned unopposed in every boud