A Compendium of Natural Philosophy Author:John Wesley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: cerning them, namely, that the bernacles were produced by trees, and that, in course of time, the said bernacles changed to geese; and on this account the partic... more »ular goose to which this fabulous origin was imputed, is still called the bernacle goose, and sometimes the tree goose. Absurd, contrary to every operation in nature, and, impossible, as those changes are, they were once regularly believed by writers on natural history; and some went even so far as to mention cases of the change which had been seen actually taking place, in some of the pools of fresh water in the central counties of England. Now the bernacle is never by any chance found, except in salt water; and the goose which the fables represented as being produced in this curious way, is rare in those parts of England at all seasons of the year, and never by any chance breeds there. Thefew remarks and illustrations which we have now made, are all that our limits will permit us to give relative to this very interesting division of invertebrated animals ; and we must now briefly advert to those which are still more numerous, and of a different type from any which have been noticed. CHAPTER IT. ARTICULATED ANIMALS AND THEIR SEVERAL CLASSES. Though the articulated animals differ much from each other, in size, in form, and in habits, yet there is a general character which runs through the whole, and which agrees well with the general name. Like the mollusca they have no internal bones of any kind ; but they always have a covering of some consistency, and frequently of considerable hardness and strength. This covering., even when hardest, does not approach the nature of shell, but is wholly an animal substance, bearing a resemblance to horn, or rather to the hard plates with which the bodies of tortoises are covere...« less