![]() These sea-faring seeds helped illustrate the existence of the Gulf Stream to early scientists. III, 3.Īlthough the seeds are large, they also happen to be very light and buoyant and can remain viable for up to two years floating around the seas. Paul Hermann Wilhelm Taubert (1862-1897) – Leguminosae. in Engelmann (ed.): Natürliche Pflanzenfamilien. The fairy eggs are the seeds that grow in the longest seed pod in the world, up to six and a half feet long. It was Entada gigas, also known as the monkey ladder tree, a legume that grows in Central America and the Caribbean. If a fairy had ever created a tree, it very well may have looked like the gnarled, twisted, vine-like plant that grew. What grew was a plant unlike any found in Scotland or Norway–or anywhere in the north. Some of the fairy eggs sprouted and grew. RendleĪ few curious botanists took the fairy eggs and planted them. The classification of flowering plants by A. A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, M. This advice she presently follow’d, and having milk’d one Cow into the Pale with the Nut in it, the Milk was all Blood, and the Nut chang’d its colour into dark brown: she used the Nut again, and all the Cows gave pure good Milk, which they ascribe to the Virtue of the Nut. Malcolm Campbell, Steward of Harries, told me, that some Weeks before my arrival there, all his Cows gave Blood instead of Milk, for several days together: one of the Neighbours told his Wife that this must be Witchcraft, and it would be easy to remove it, if she would but take the white Nut, call’d the Virgin Mary’s Nut and lay it in the Pail into which she was to milk the Cows. In other places they were gathered and worn as protection from the evil eye, or used as folk medicine for diarrhea and dysentery and to cure sick cows. Many cultures from northern lands considered the fairy eggs lucky and turned them into jewelry, binding them in silver or tin. If one was placed in a house, it protected the building from fire. On various shorelines around the northern hemisphere where they washed up, they were carved out and used as snuff boxes, match boxes, lockets or rattles for children. These fairy eggs were used as amulets against drowning by sailors in the Hebrides and as amulets for childbirth by women, who passed them down to their daughters through generations. According to Letters from the Irish Highlands by Henry Blake, “The unlearned natives of Cunnemarra have, however, found a fanciful use of these nuts, by laying them under the pillows of their straw bed, as a charm against the nocturnal visits of the fairies.” Description of the Isles of Orkney by Rev. The sidhe (fairies) often trying to take people as they slept. In Ireland, the fairy eggs were used as protection against the fairies, who had a habit of bringing all manner of misfortune upon the Irish. Other people believed they were the flotsam from shipwrecks or items dropped by sailors. Corals were often pulled up by fisherman so the world of underwater ‘plants’ was somewhat known, if still not fully understood. ![]() ![]() Some early naturalists believed they came from mysterious underwater plants like coral, seaweed or even a sea tree. In the Faroe Islands and Norway they were known as elf-kidneys. In addition to fairy eggs, they were also called strand-nuts or sea-nuts. Nearly hand sized, the buoyant eggs were hard like wood, flattened and sometimes heart-shaped. Residents of the Scottish Isles and other northern coasts, found the large, brown fairy eggs mysterious. ![]() On the shoreline of the Hebrides the strandline might reveal skate egg cases, barnacle geese attached to driftwood, Aristotle’s lanterns or perhaps, a fairy egg. ![]() The strandline is full of wonderful treasures. ![]()
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