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A corroded section of stovepipe mailed in barnacles, or the skeleton of a hoopskirt protruding from the tide mud like the remains of some old-time wreck, is apt to break the enchantment. I fear I have given the reader an exaggerated idea of the solitude that reigns along the river-side. Sometimes there is society here of an unconventional kind, if you care to seek it.
The barnacles, which with their wedge-shaped prows cut the water at the moment of the stroke, but open in the pauses between the waves, so that the creature may with its branching arms grasp at the food which floats about it; the nullipores, forms of seaweed which are framed of limestone and cling firmly to the rock afford yet other instances of protective adaptations contrived to insure the safety of creatures which dwell in the field of abundant food supply.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "it was enough to make a wooden Indian laugh. The old jay with the barnacles telling us about the advantages of a sailor's life. And Steve's face! Ho! ho!" His mother snorted disgust. "If you had brains," she declared, "you would have understood what he meant by saying that the sea was the place to learn what to unlearn. He was hitting at you.
One thing surprised me much; the top of its head, which was rough and knotty like the bark of an old tree, was swarming with little crabs and barnacles, and other small creatures. The whale's head seemed to be their regular home! This fish was by no means one of the largest kind, but being the first I had seen, I fancied it must be the largest fish in the sea.
Or, reversing the metaphor, we might liken our present state to that of the hulls of ships submerged in a dim ocean among strange monsters, propelled in a blind manner through space; proud perhaps of accumulating many barnacles as decoration; only recognizing our destination by bumping against the dock-wall; and with no cognizance of the deck and cabins above us, or the spars and sails no thought of the sextant, and the compass, and the captain no perception of the lookout on the mast of the distant horizon.
A down grade in the Shell Road, where it dipped toward the shore, helped things along. Barnacles tightened the traces, the sprit-sail did its share, and in an amazingly short time the odd vehicle was spinning toward Sculpin Point at a ten-knot gait. Desperately Mrs. Bean gripped the gunwale and lustily she screamed: "Whoa, whoa! Stop him, Captain, stop him! He'll smash us all to pieces!"
In these beds there are fragments of wood, legs of crabs, barnacles encrusted with corallines still partially retaining their colour, imperfect fragments of a Pholas distinct from any known species, and of a Venus, approaching very closely to, but slightly different in form from, the V. lenticularis, a species living on the coast of Chile.
Although these reeds are fresh-water plants, they were covered with barnacles, having been killed by an incursion of salt-water over an extent of many acres, where the sea had for a season usurped a space previously gained from it by the river.
Smith's theory therefore is that the action of the testes in metabolism is rather to take something from the blood than to add something to it, and that it is this subtractive effect which influences the development of somatic sexual organs. Sacculina is one of the Cirripedia, and therefore allied to the Barnacles.
By the light-stick we made it out to be a large, barnacle-crusted cask. "She's been afloat for forty years," was Mr. Pike's judgment. "Look at the size of the barnacles, and look at the whiskers." "And it's full of something," said Mr. Mellaire. "Hope it isn't water."
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