The Journal of a 'Naturalist, 187 



(*9carabae^us stercorarius) and some other insects, has also been 

 attributed, in some few instances, to birds ; but the fact ap- 

 pears very liable to misconception, that which has been taken 

 for art, may be merely the paralysing effect of fear. How 

 are we to ascertain that it is not so ? 



Perhaps there are few persons, who ever think upon such 

 subjects at all, that have not, at one time or another, been 

 struck with the numberless dangers that beset the earth- 

 worm (Zumbricus terrestris). "Eminently serviceable as this 

 worm is," says the writer, " it yet becomes the prey of various 

 orders of the animal creation, and perhaps is a solitary examr 

 pie of an individual race being subjected to universal destruc- 

 tion. The very emmet seizes it, when disabled, and bears it 

 away as its prize : it constitutes, throughout the year, the food 

 of many birds ; fishes devour it greedily ; the hedgehog eats 

 it ; the mole pursues it unceasingly in the pastures, along the 

 moist bottoms of ditches, and burrows after it through the 

 banks of hedges, to which it retires in dry seasons ; secured, 

 as the worm appears to be by its residence in the earth, from 

 the capture of creatures inhabiting a different element, yet 

 many aquatic animals seem well acquainted with it, and prey 

 on it as a natural food, whenever it falls in their way; frogs 

 eat it ; and even the great water-beetle I have known to seize 

 it, when the bait of the angler ; and it has been drawn up by 

 the hook. Yet notwithstanding this prodigious destruction of 

 the animal, its increase is fully commensurate to its consump- 

 tion, as if ordained the appointed food of all ; and Reaumur 

 computes, though from what data it is difficult to conjecture, 

 that the number of worms lodged in the bosom of the earth 

 exceeds that of the grains of all kinds of corn collected by 

 man." These observations carry us yet a little further : we 

 remember that, various as are the creatures that feed upon 

 the worm, the food which sustains that reptile, in its turn, is 

 equally miscellaneous. The creatures that eat the worm, 

 while living, are eaten by it when they are dead ; and it is 

 possible that, in the never-ceasing change of things, the parti- 

 cles of which every living creature is composed may be destined 

 to undergo these numerous dangers in the form of the worm. 

 The thought is not a proud one, perhaps not a pleasing one; 

 — but we stay not here — change still proceeds — and by this 

 process the self-same atoms may, in turn, compose a lily or a 

 lark. 



The author speaks, perhaps, somewhat too strongly in as- 

 serting that winter is " the time in which nature is most 

 busily employed;", and that all the fruits and flowers of the 

 summer are only the advance of what has been ordained and 



o 2 



