CIRRIPEDES. 



317 



No one can look at the two volumes on the recent Cirri- 

 pedes, of 399 and 684 pages respectively (not to speak of the 

 volumes on the fossil species), without being struck by the 

 immense amount of detailed work which they contain. The 

 forty plates, some of them with thirty figures, and the four- 

 teen pages of index in the two volumes together, give some 

 rough idea of the labour spent on the work.* The state of 

 knowledge, as regards the Cirripedes, was most unsatisfactory 

 at the time that my father began to work at them. As an 

 illustration of this fact, it may be mentioned that he had 

 even to re-organise the nomenclature of the group, or, as he 

 expressed it, he " unwillingly found it indispensable to give 

 names to several valves, and to some few of the softer parts 

 of Cirripedes." f It is interesting to learn from his diary the 

 amount of time which he gave to different genera. Thus 

 the genus Chthamalus, the description of which occupies 

 twenty-two pages, occupied him for thirty-six days ; Coro- 

 nula took nineteen days, and is described in twenty-seven 

 pages. Writing to Fitz-Roy, he speaks of being "for the 

 last half-month daily hard at work in dissecting a little ani- 

 mal about the size of a pin's head, from the Chonos archi- 

 pelago, and I could spend another month, and daily see more 

 beautiful structure." 



Though he became excessively weary of the work before 

 the end of the eight years, he had much keen enjoyment in 

 the course of it. Thus he wrote to Sir J. D. Hooker (1847 ?) : 

 — " As you say, there is an extraordinary pleasure in pure 

 observation ; not but what I suspect the pleasure in this case 

 is rather derived from comparisons forming in one's mind 

 with allied structures. After having been so long employed 

 in writing my old geological observations, it is delightful to 

 use one's eyes and fingers again." It was, in fact, a return to 



* The reader unacquainted with Zoology will find some account of the 

 more interesting results in Mr. Romane's article on "Charles Darwin" 

 ('Nature' Series, 1882). 



f Vol. i. p. 3. 



