This genus is commonly known as the ship-barnacle, also as the goose-barnacle. It attaches itself to floating logs as well as to ships, but the latter form its principal home; consequently it is a great voyager, and, though common everywhere, is everywhere considered a stranger. The same species are found on ships coming from the most remote and widely separated regions, and so they cannot be considered native to any one locality. They are wanderers on the deep, and grow in such numbers on the bottoms of ships, especially of those which sail in warm seas, that they seriously impede the progress of the vessels. Aside from diminishing its speed, they do a ship no injury. There was a tradition, which lasted several centuries, that geese were hatched from these shells, which somewhat resemble eggs. Gerard, in the appendix to his "Herball or Generale Historie of Plants" (1597), gives a picture of shells of /Lepas/ growing on a tree, with geese falling from them and swimming about in the water below. His description is as follows: "There are founde in the North parts of Scotland and the islands adjacent called Orchades certaine trees whereon do growe certaine shell fishes of a white color, tending to russet, wherein are conteined little living creatures; which shells in time of maturitie do open, and out of them grow those little living foules whom we call barnakles, in the North of England brant geise, and in Lancashire tree geise; but [pg253] the other that do fall upon the land do perish and come to nothing." He then describes in detail the various transformations, and ends with: "But what our eies have seen and hands have touched we shall declare." The long, flexible stalk of /Lepas/ is its anterior end. Generally this stalk is only half an inch long, but in some species it attains the length of a foot. Huxley describes the barnacle as a crustacean fixed by its head and kicking food into its mouth with its legs. The mouth has a pair of small mandibles and two pairs of maxillæ, the last pair uniting to form a lower lip. The thorax has six pairs of branched appendages. The body is enveloped in a fold of skin, to which are attached five shell-like plates. One of these plates is long and narrow, and extends along the dorsal side; two are large and triangular (the terga); two are small and triangular (the scuta), the long point extending downward. These shells are on the free or posterior end. Barnacles have a nervous system, consisting of a brain and a chain of five or more ganglia, but no special respiratory or circulatory organs are known; the cirripeds, or feet, are supposed to perform these functions. They have also a food-canal, a digestive gland, and excretory tubes. The eggs are carried under the external fold of the skin in flat cakes.