THE HUMBLE WORM

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LX, Issue 90, 14 November 1939, Page 6

THE HUMBLE WORM

ITS IMPORTANCE IN AGRICULTURE . STORY OF ITS LIFE CYCLE j Millions of worms inhabit the soil of Great Britain. Few people understand what wonderful creaturees they are, writes C. A. Lyon in "The Sunday Express," London. They make agriculture possible, they move mountains, and from our little Europe they have travelled in ships to spread all over the world, even from New York to the Rocky Mountains. Charles Darwin, the great biologist, had a high opinion of worms. He went so far as to say that it was doubtful whether any other animal had played so important a part in history. He has two ways of getting along. In the soft topsoil he pushes the front part of his body forward like a wedge. Then he pushes his throat apparatus forward into the front part of his body, causing himself to swell up like a balloon, and thus opening up a way in the soil. He then thrusts his front part forward again, and repeats. This is the way a worm begins his burrow. Painstaking trenches dug by biologists shows that the worm goes as much as six feet down in the ground. He pushes himself through the earth with bristles on his underside. They are so strong that he cannot be picked up against his will without killing him. He is quite an engineer, for this burrow you can see which looks so crude is really lined with hard, smooth "cement" he ejects from his body. It is really a little underground railway—at the end of it is a small chamber where the worm occasionally reposes rolled up with three or four other worms. When he gets a good way down the worm uses his second boring method. He begins to eat the earth. He sucks it into his mouth. He has neither teeth nor tongue nor jaws. Is it not, then, astonishing that simply by sucking power of his lips the earthworm will work his way not only through the hardest soilf but through brick walls or even concrete? If you were to kill a worm and open up his gizzard you would find it full of sharp stones. The worm sucks? a tiny piece of hard Soil into his mouth and swallows it. Within his gizzard he grinds and grinds it up between the stones as if in a mill. Dirt is his food. The soil consumed by the worm contains small living animals. It is for this, not at all out of a love of burrowing, that the worm makes his underground passages. It has been found

by experiment that the worm can easily live by eating soil alone. But in practice he has a second food— leaves. The worm spends all day underground, eating soil. But at night he comes to the surface and nibbles at leaves. He dare not come to the surface in daylight. Not because of the sun, but because the ultra-violet rays are fatal to him. He usually keeps the end of his tail in his burrow so as to find his way back, for he is blind. Periodically the worm comes to the surface to eject the earth he has eaten. He makes a neat "cast," using his tail as a trowel. The cast a worm makes is of world importance. It is in simple truth the whole basis of crops. For the earth has been mixed in the worm's body with broken-up leaves. It has been ground to a fine paste. It has been enriched by the acids made inside the worm. It emerges, from his body as the richest and most nutritious crop-growing soil. : Darwin calculated on. the basis of long research that every year the worms of England and Wales eat and deposit on the surface 320,000,000 tons of soil. This means that they eat up the whole top soil of the country several times a century. The worm lives a good age, even as much as five years, till an unlucky storm floods his burrow. He can absorb through his skin the oxygen he heeds either from air or standing water and oxygen dissolved in it. But new rainwater he can't bear. He makes his best speed—a foot a minute ; —to the surface. There he meets the daylight, which contains the ultra-violet rays that are fatal to him. And the worm is found dead on the garden path.