FIELD AND FOREST. 1 25 



and carries it into the house. Let us go in with him, and see if he can 

 find any item of interest in the anatomy of this humble dweller in the 

 earth. He sits down by the window, and looks at it. 



Its surface is smooth and shining; its ring-like segments attract by 

 their regularity, and the slightest contact with its extremely sensitive 

 skin induces active movements in graceful curves which are anything 

 but unpleasing to an artistic eye. It elongates its anterior rings into 

 a pointed head, and with a projected proboscis goes poking about 

 blindly. It opens its tumid lips, and closes them against his hand as 

 though in rage it would bite an opening for escape — poor impotent 

 worm. What a helpless and degraded creature it seems ! It grovels 

 in the dirt, it is trodden under foot, it is blind and deaf and dumb; it is 

 persecuted by the robins, it is hunted to the death by the small boy, 

 it is dissected by the man with the microscope; it hides away from the 

 light and the warmth of the sun ; it appears on the surface only when 

 clouds are over the sky, or in the darkness of the night, or, when 

 drowned out by a heavy rain, it leaves its crumbling home, to perish 

 in a cataclysm. It has no weapon of offense or defense; it has but one 

 protection : Its sense of feeling, and that it has acutely- 

 Deaf and dumb! is it?* The fish that swallow it, occasionally if not 

 at all times, speak to each other in an icthyic language, often audible 

 if not intelligible to us ; so, when on a warm spring evening two earth 

 worms meet on the gravel walk, where they seem as helpless and out of 

 place as the historic trout in the same situation, why may they not 

 have some means of communication audible, or at least sensific to them- 

 selves? There are stranger things ! Or do they "meet by chance in the 

 usual" lumbricoid "way, "whatever that may be? "Have you forgotten 

 the pretty thought about the growing of the grass and budding of the 

 flowers? — that it is only because our eyes are not fine enough that we 

 do not see a lily open, or a clover bloom; and only because our ears 

 are not delicate enough, that we do not hear the sap circulate in a rose 

 leaf, or the heart throb in the insect that alights upon it." 



But the man with the microscope is dreaming. He leaves the 

 window. He brings out his needles in pen-holder handles, his wellworn 

 dissecting tools, his loaded cork and acetic acid bottle. He is about to 

 search, not for the picturesque, but for the Interesting and the Beautiful in 



* C. C. Abbot, M. D., Am. Nat. Mar. 1877. 



