" 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 described by Gerarde:--"Being at Rugby,
about such time as our fantastic people did with great concourse and
multitudes repair and run headlong unto the sacred wells of Newnam
Regis, in the edge of Warwickshire, as unto the Waters of Life, which
could cure all diseases.
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