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Updated: May 31, 2025
Our great naturalist, Darwin, gave eight years' study to our lowly brother, the barnacle; he gave an almost equal amount of time to the study of the earthworm and its functions, revealing to us, in one of his most charming books, how much of our golden harvest, of our pastures, and our jewelled garden-beds, we owe to this silent and patient laborer.
The mode of progression which the little earthworm adopts, is a familiar illustration of this style of proceeding. In the higher forms of air-living animals, a freer and more commodious kind of movement is provided for. The body itself is raised up from the ground upon pointed columns, which are made to act as levers as well as props.
An earthworm avoids the light of day and digs its burrow and seeks its food by wonderfully coördinated activities of its muscles and other parts, which are controlled by a double chain of ganglia along its ventral side, connected with a similar pair of grouped nerve-cells above the anterior part of the digestive tract.
The giants came up, and the first pushed him with his foot, and said, 'What sort of an earthworm is that? The second said, 'Crush him dead. But the third said contemptuously, 'It is not worth the trouble! Let him live; he cannot remain here, and if he goes higher up the mountain the clouds will take him and carry him off. Talking thus they went away.
It is a long path back for some of us and to cover it at a bound has its dangers. The earthworm shrivels in the sudden sun and to leap from the city block to the depths of the woods is to suffer from the "growing pains" of awakening, atrophied senses. The half-way ground is the pasture which once was the forest, which later was man's, and where now nature and human-nature mingle in friendly truce.
"Oh, come, Berkeley!" he protested, "don't rate us too low. The humblest of creatures has its uses 'even the little pismire, you know, as Isaak Walton tells us. Why, I have got substantial help from a stamp-collector. And then reflect upon the motor-scorcher and the earthworm and the blow-fly.
A cigarette kind of makes him seem pleasantly undependable. A pipe makes you feel he's full of just everyday notions. But a cigar! My! It sort of dazzles me when I see a man with a big cigar. I feel like a lowgrade earthworm, don't you know. Say," she cried, with an indescribable gesture of her gloved hands, "he handles that cigar, he sort of fondles it. He cocks it. He depresses it.
The water will pass through the earthworm burrows and the organically rich soil will become liquid manure and can be collected at the bottom of the container. As the hay and cowdung is eaten up by the earthworms, this should gradually be replaced. Conclusion In nature, litter is decomposed in a way similar to what happens in a vermicompost pit.
The effort to dramatize the relation of an earthworm to its environment makes us recognize that its predicament is our own, different only in degree. We are exercising ourselves in humility and meekness, but of a sort leading to a mastery that may well make the meek the inheritors of the earth.
Conceivably man may presently contrive some sort of earthworm apparatus, so that he could go through the rocks prospecting very much as an earthworm goes through the soil, excavating in front and dumping behind, but, to put it moderately, there are considerable difficulties. And I doubt the imaginative effect.
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