scribes the various transformations of this bird:--

"So, slowe Bootes 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.

Among some of the many other equally wonderful plants may be mentioned
the "stony wood," which is thus desc