In accordance with this rapid growth is the frequency of the periods of exuviation. Mr. Thompson kept twenty specimens of _B. balanoides_ alive, and on the twelfth day he found the twenty-first cast-off integument, showing that all had moulted once, and one individual twice, within this period.[74] This frequency of exuviation, together with the durability of the cast-off integuments, explains the astonishing masses of exuviæ, which Mr. Peach assures me he annually has observed off the coast of Cornwall; they are most abundant in April and May, but he has seen quantities also in September; he could easily, as he tells me, have filled several quart-measures with them. The specimens sent to me consisted chiefly of _Balanus balanoides_, _perforatus_, and _Chthamalus stellatus_. The opercular membrane, with a narrow strip from between the two scuta, and another narrow strip from between the two terga, are moulted together, in connection with the more delicate membrane lining the sack, and investing the plicated branchiæ. This membrane, likewise, is continuously connected with that covering the whole body and its appendages. As I have stated under the Lepadidæ, the inner tunic of the œsophagus, of the rectum, of the olfactory pouches, and that which enters a little way into the acoustic meatus, and the apodemes of the maxillæ, are all moulted. On the cirri and jaws, new spines are formed with their upper ends enclosed within the old spines, but with their lower ends projecting inwards, beyond the bases of the old spines, and inverted like the fingers of a glove hastily pulled off. The membranes of the body, in the act of exuviation, split, I believe, only over the prosoma. How the neat separation of the opercular membrane, from all round the sheath and opercular valves, is effected, I do not fully understand; but it is, probably, analogous to the splitting of the thick carapace of the common crab. I suspect in Coronula, in which genus and its allies the opercular membrane is not periodically moulted, that the membrane lining the sack is not always thrown off at the same exact time with that of the body. In _Chthamalus stellatus_, in the act of moulting, the opercular membrane is the last part that separates from the new underlying membranes: I find that this species can moult when kept in a damp box out of water. The new membranes of the body, immediately after the exuviation, are not lax in any extreme degree. The exuviæ of the genus Chthamalus, and of some other genera amongst the Chthamalinæ, can at once be recognised by the divergence of the posterior _four_ pairs of cirri: in the case of _Chthamalus stellatus_ I have also noticed that the animal generally dies with these cirri in the same divergent position. Finally, I cannot doubt[75] that the Triton described by Linnæus was only the exuviæ of some Balanus (probably _B. porcatus_); Linnæus mistaking the probosciformed penis for the mouth of his imagined distinct animal.