autumn of 1874, a piece of timber literally alive with Cirrhopodes lepadidæ was cast ashore, and I viewed it with some sympathy for the popular error. Before leaving geese I will show how Drayton deals with superstitions, dealt with by Sir Walter Scott long afterwards in one of the best-known passages in Marmion,[1] I mean that in which the nuns of Whitby told—
"how of a thousand snakes each one
Was turned into a coil of stone.
When holy Hilda pray'd
Themselves within their holy bound,
Their stony folds had often found.
They told how sea-fowls' pinions fail
As over Whitby's towers they sail,
And sinking down with flutterings faint
They do their homage to the saint."
In the early part of the seventeenth century the same poetic material was thus employed, the proud North Riding being the speaker.[2]
"Like Whitby's self I think there's none can show but I
O'er whose attractive earth there may no wild geese fly.
For presently they fall from off their wings to ground.
If this no wonder be, where's there a wonder found?
And stones like serpents there, yet may ye more behold
That in their natural yres are up together roll'd."
A rationalistic explanation of the check in the flight of the birds is that they are weary after a long journey over the sea, and glad to lower their sails on reaching Whitby scar. The snakes are fossil ammonites.
In the song of the dying swan, Drayton had the staunch belief that becomes a poet and his verse. "Let pyes and daws," he said—
"sit dumb before their death,[3]
Only the swan sings at the parting breath."
There are other natural history specimens which we can hardly afford to miss. Perhaps the animal which we should least suspect of enjoying any special revelation as to the benefits of abstinence is the
