"4. And flying in open day in the sight of all men, lays it upon the altar of the sun, and so returns from whence it came.
"5. The priests then search into the records of the time and find that it returned precisely at the end of five hundred years.
"6. And shall we then think it to be any very great and strange thing for the Lord of all to raise up those that religiously serve Him in the assurance of a good faith when even by a bird He shows us the greatness of His power to fulfil His promise?"
Another bird which had (has?) ascribed to it an origin to the full as fabulous as that attributed to the phoenix is what naturalists now call the Anser leucopsis, or barnacle goose, and what Drayton spoke of as the tree goose, from its supposed vegetable inception. The history of the myth of these
"fowles from planchers sprung,"[1]
placed by the poet of the Polyolbion amongst the wonders of our native isle, has been so fully and so recently set forth by Max Müller in Lectures on the Science of Language,[2] that it is unnecessary for me to do more than refer my readers to that work if they do not already know with whom Drayton shared his belief, and how that belief arose. About Furness[3] he informs us are—
"scatter'd trees which naturally partake
The fatness of the soil (in many a shiny lake
Their roots so deeply soaked), send from their stocky bough
A soft and sappy gum from which those tree-geese grow,
Call'd barnacles by us, which like a jelly first
To the beholder seeme them like the fluxine nurst.
Still great and greater thrive until you well may see
Them turn'd to perfect fowles, when dropping from the tree
Into the merey pond which under them doth lie,
Wax ripe and taking wing away in flockes do fly,
Which well our ancients did among our wonders place."
Of this process Gerarde has a most sensational picture, which Drayton, no doubt, had seen; it has been very correctly copied for Max Müller's book. When I was sojourning at Bournemouth, during the
