SOIL PESTS 105 



" sterilized " soil, and one would have thought they had 

 achieved the millennium as far as gardening was con- 

 cerned. The results, however, did not pan out according 

 to book, as these good people forgot those three words, 

 " the hving soil." 



Earthworms have been the means whereby we have 

 obtained the soil itself. Their constant activities, which 

 Darwin spent a large part of his life in studying, have 

 gone on through the countless centuries of geological 

 time, and we owe even the present face of nature, the 

 drainage, aeration, manuring, and alteration of hill and 

 dale to the never ceasing and apparently insignificant 

 action of the earthworm, to which I shall recur in the 

 chapter on the nature of soils. 



