rdinary and persistent myths of medieval natural history, dating back
to the 12th century at least, was the cause of transferring to these
organisms the name of the barnack or bernacle goose (_Bernicla branta_).
This bird is a winter visitor to Britain, and its Arctic nesting-places
being then unknown, it was fabled to originate within the shell-like fruit
of a tree growing by the sea-shore. In some variants of the story this
shell is said to grow as a kind of mushroom on rotting timber in the sea,
and is obviously one of the barnacles of the genus _Lepas_. Even after the
scientific study of zoology had replaced the fabulous tales of medieval
writers, it was a long time before the true affinities of the barnacles
were appreciated, and they were at first classed with the Mollusca, some of
which they closely resemble in external appearance. It was not till Vaughan
Thompson demonstrated, in 1830, their development from a free-swimming and
typically Crustacean larva that it came to be recognized that, in Huxley's
graphic phrase, "a barnacle may be said to be a Crustacean fixed by its
head and kicking the food into its mouth with its legs." For a systematic
account of the barnacles and their allies, see the article THYROSTRACA.

(W. T. CA.)

BARNARD, LADY ANNE (1750-1825), author of the ballad "Auld Robin Gray," the
eldest daughter of James Lindsay, 5th earl of Balcarres, was born at
Balcarres House, Fife, on the 12th of December 1750. She was married in
1793 to Andrew Barnard, a son of the bishop of Limerick, for whom she
obtained from Henry Dundas (1st Viscount Melville) an appointment as
colonial secretary at the Cape of Good Hope. Thither the Barnards went in
March 1797, Lady Anne remaining at the Cape until January 1802. A
remarkable series of letters written by Lady Anne thence to Dundas, then
secretary for war and the colonies, was published in 1901 under the title
_South Africa a Century Ago_. In 1806, on the reconquest of the Cape by the
British, Barnard was reappointed colonial secretary, but Lady Anne did not
accompany him thither, where he died in 1807. The rest of her life was
passed in London, where she died on the 6th of May 1825. "Auld Robin Gray"
was written by her in 1772, to music by the Rev. William Leeves
(1748-1828), as he admitted in 1812. It was published anonymously in 1783,
Lady Anne only acknowledging the authorship of the words two years before
her death in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, who subsequ