It is true enough that the drawings from Mykenæan pots here submitted cannot be considered as a complete demonstration that the legend of the tree-goose originated with these drawings. But it must be remembered that we have only a small number of examples of this pottery surviving from a thousand years B.C. It is probable that the fanciful decorative design of a master artist was copied and used in the painting of hundreds of pots by mere workmen or inferior craftsmen, and that more complete and impressive designs showing the fanciful transformation of leaf or fruit to goose, and of goose to barnacle, existed both before and after the making of the particular pots and jars which have come down to us. The supposition made by M. Houssay (which I entirely support) is that some later Levantine people--to whom these decorated pots or copies of their decorations became known either in the regular way of trade or as sailors' "curios"--were led to attempt an explanation of the significance of the pictures drawn upon them, and in accordance with a well-known and rooted tendency--interpreted the fancies of the artist as careful representations of astonishing fact. The existence of a tree which produces buds which become birds, and of a barnacle which becomes transformed into a goose--is the matter-of-fact interpretation of the few pictures of these animals which have come down to us, modern men, painted on the few pots of that remote Mykenæan industry now in our museums. It is not at all unlikely that in the vast period of time between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the more striking of these designs had been copied and familiarized in some part of the ancient world. It is true that we do not at present know in what part: we have not yet come across these designs of later date than 800 B.C. The absence of the story of the tree-goose from Greek and Roman lore is striking. Neither Aristotle nor Herodotus knew of it, although it has been erroneously stated that they refer to it. Yet the source of it was there in the Greek isles almost under their noses (if one may speak of the noses of such splendid and worshipful men of old) in the artistic work--otherwise not unknown to the Greeks--of a civilization which preceded their own by hundreds of years. There is other and ample evidence--as for instance that of the representation of the "flying gallop" (see "Science from an Easy Chair," Second Series, pp. 57 and 63), showing that Mykenæan art had little or no direct effect on the Hellenes, although the reputation of the skill of the old race in metal work came through many generations to them. Mykenæan art seems to have migrated with Mykenæan settlers to the remote region of the Caucasus. In the necropolis of Koban and other remote settlements, Mykenæan designs in bronze and gold--including the horse in flying gallop and octopods transformed to bull's heads--have been found and pictured (Ernest Chantre, "Recherches anthropologique dans Caucase," 4 vols.: Paris, 1886). They are believed to date from 500 B.C. It is possible that in such remote regions or in some of the Greek islands the pictures of the tree-goose and the barnacle may have survived until the new dispensation--that is, until the days of the Byzantine Empire. Once we can trace either the pictures or the legend up to that point, there is no difficulty about admitting the radiation of the wonderful story from that centre to the Jews of the Kabbalah, to Arabic writers, and so to the learned men of the Christian Church and the seats of learning throughout Europe and a great part of Asia.