Brant (goose) the "Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds" applies. "Branta" is a Latinised form of Old Norse "brandgás", "burnt (black) goose", and "bernicla" is the medieval Latin name for the barnacle. The brant and the similar barnacle goose were previously considered one species, formerly believed to be the same creature as the crustacean. That myth can be dated back to at least the 12th century. Gerald of Wales claimed to have seen these birds hanging down from pieces of timber, William Turner accepted the theory, and John Gerard claimed to have seen the birds emerging from their shells. The
Genus of a quadratic form the same genus have equal discriminant and hence there are only finitely many equivalence classes in a genus. The Smith–Minkowski–Siegel mass formula gives the "weight" or "mass" of the quadratic forms in a genus, the count of equivalence classes weighted by the reciprocals of the orders of their automorphism groups. For binary quadratic forms there is a group structure on the set "C" equivalence classes of forms with given discriminant. The genera are defined by the "generic characters". The principal genus, the genus containing the principal form, is precisely the subgroup "C" and the genera are the cosets of "C":