70 HOUSE, GARDEN, AND FIELD 



contributions to the Philosophical Transactions had to be 

 communicated by Sir Somebody Somebody. In those 

 days admission to the Royal Society was easily got by 

 men of wealth, distinguished by that " landed manner," 

 which Adam Sedgwick remarked among the early fellows 

 of the Geological Society. It could be got by scientific 

 attainments also, if they were acknowledged by the world ; 

 but Thompson's merits found no judges at once competent 

 and influential. The year of his death, 1847, was the 

 very year in which admission to the Royal Society was 

 regulated by a new system, which gave for the first time 

 due weight to scientific merit. 



Neither in 1826, when Thompson's observations on the 

 transformation of the rock-barnacle were made, nor in 

 1830, when they were first published, was any other 

 zoologist aware of the singular transformation of the 

 rock-barnacle, or of the proof which it afforded that 

 Cuvier's views as to the nature of barnacles were de- 

 monstrably unsound. In 1834 Burmeister published 

 observations which placed it beyond doubt that stalked 

 barnacles also hatch out as free-swimming larvae, which 

 after a time settle down and become enclosed in a fixed 

 shell. Burmeister added the interesting fact that the 

 stalked barnacle has two larval stages, only the second of 

 which is provided with a bivalve shell. Thompson con- 

 tinued to prosecute his own researches, and in 1835, a 

 year after Burmeister, he published his own account of 

 the transformation of the stalked barnacle. Two ships 

 coming into Cork Harbour, one from the Mediterranean, 

 the other from North America, brought on their bottoms 

 innumerable stalked barnacles. Thompson got a large 

 supply, and kept them alive in sea-water till they emitted 

 prodigious numbers of larvae, not at all the same as those 

 which had been seen to change into rock-barnacles, and 

 easily distinguished by the total absence of the bivalve 

 shell. Thompson published his observations in complete 

 ignorance of Burmeister 's discoveries. 



