Bibliographical Notice. 443 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. 
The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, 
with Observations on their Habits. By Cuartes Darwin, LL.D., 
F.R.S. Sm. 8vo. London: Murray, 1881. 
Earrnworms are probably not regarded with much interest by the 
public in general. For the most part they are looked upon as 
nuisances, from their exceedingly unpleasant habit of disfiguring 
the lawns and gravel-walks of our gardens with their unsightly 
castings; and the only people who hold them in any degree of 
esteem (and that manifested in a way that the worms themselves 
can hardly be expected to appreciate very highly) are the anglers, 
who occasionally use worms as bait, and then, no doubt, follow the 
advice of the old piscatorial writer and handle them as if they loved 
them, always barring the insertion of the hook, which it would 
be hard to interpret into a sign of affection. This feeling of indif- 
ference, perhaps verging upon contempt, has been abundantly re- 
flected in what is by courtesy styled the “ comic literature” of 
the day, since the appearance of the book of which the title stands 
at the head ef this article. The jokers and soi-disant jokers who 
produce that marvellous flood of words with which we are familiar 
in the so-called comic journals found something exquisitely funny 
in the notion of a grave philosopher devoting his time to the obser- 
vation of earthworms, and at once gave utterance to a series of more 
or less jocular remarks on the subject, most of which serve chiefly to 
prove (what, indeed, is tolerably evident from their efforts in other 
directions) that the writers in question have entirely mistaken their 
vocation in attempting to be funny. 
We can quite believe that similar sentiments were entertained by 
most people when, some forty-four years ago, at a time when pro- 
bably most of our readers had not begun to think very much, and 
certainly few of them had turned their thoughts to scientific subjects, 
the naturalist, who now above all others fulfils the requirements in- 
volved in that title, communicated to the Geological Society a short 
paper, in which he maintained that earthworms have played and are 
still playing a very important part in the economy of this world 
of ours. 
We do not know how the Fellows of the Society received the 
novel views put forward by Mr. Darwin in this paper ; but they 
printed it in their Transactions, and the question of the influence 
of worms on the cultivation both of fields and gardens was for some 
time a subject of discussion. Many, no doubt, like the Vicomte 
D’Archiac, regarded Mr. Darwin’s earthworm-theory as a singular 
one; but we fancy that, on the whole, the conclusion arrived at 
was, that the action of worms upon the soil was beneficial (mechani- 
eally at all events) to cultivation, although comparatively little im- 
portance was assigned to it. Mr. Darwin, however, continued his 
observations, and supplemented them with numerous experiments, 
after the persevering fashion with which he has familiarized us in 
ol* 
