662 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



bottom is scraped just before leaving port, young goose barnacles 

 attach themselves in such numbers that, owing to their rapid 

 growth, they seriously retard the ship's progress. There is no 

 remedy but to sail on, letting them grow as fast as they will, and 

 removing them when port is reached. Norwegian sailors believe 

 that the barnacle goose hatches out of the goose barnacle, and 

 many have asserted that they have seen the young just on the 

 point of flying out. This belief probably arises from the peculiar 

 scooping motion of the fringed feet of the barnacle while it is 

 obtaining food. Even then a good imagination needs some stretch- 

 ing to be able to see a resemblance to a young bird. When a 

 barnacle is young, it is free-swimming, and resembles a shrimp ; 

 but, as it grows older, it attaches itself to some object by a sort 

 of cement, and becomes so changed that, unless its anatomy is 

 carefully studied, no affinities to a shrimp would be imagined. 

 Indeed, early naturalists considered it to be a shell-fish or mol- 

 lusk. Odd as it may seem, many kinds of animals, at first pos- 

 sessed of free motion, voluntarily attach themselves to some object, 

 and are from that moment imprisoned, having no power of mov- 

 ing from place to place. 



Insects are seldom seen in a natural state far from land, but 

 we find a few young forms a little nearer shore, and one of these, 

 a fly larva ( Chironomus), is more interesting than the others on 

 account of its remarkable powers of endurance. Experiments 

 were tried, and we found that it would live after being taken out 

 of a vial of alcohol in which it had been kept several hours. 

 Most animals, under similar conditions, will die in five minutes, 

 and the most hardy in twenty. Different poisons were tried, and 

 none were effective. Even caustic potash was resisted for nearly 

 an hour. In the mean time the creature would swim around 

 lively. Such hardiness is probably found in no other animal. In 

 addition to these more interesting forms, there are hundreds of 

 species each presenting some especial peculiarity which distin- 

 guishes it from the rest, and all have interesting habits and points 

 of structure. The waters of the Gulf Stream gradually merge 

 into those of the ocean on either side, and, while there are some 

 peculiarly tropical forms which never go outside of the warm 

 water, most are likely to be taken on either side in the colder 

 waters, and there are many which are found both near shore and 

 in the Gulf Stream. After long-continued southerly winds, tropi- 

 cal forms are at times cast on shore ; and vessels passing through 

 the Gulf Stream frequently bring into port, attached to their 

 bottoms, crabs and shrimps which normally do not live in the inner 

 region. The warm waters of this part of the ocean are very favor- 

 able to rapid growth, and the animals there are tropical. Wash- 

 ing the shores of Florida, the Gulf Stream serves to transport its 



