140 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
tendrils round and round with so patent a movement that 
you can see it hour by hour like the hand of a clock, 
Perhaps the little book on earthworms is a yet more 
wonderful achievement of this great genius, who had 
not only untiring patience to observe and verify, but 
also possessed imagination, and could thereby see the 
motive idea at work behind the facts. At first it has 
a repellent sound, but we quickly learn how clumsy and 
prejudiced have bcen our views of the despised worm 
thrown up by every ploughshare. 
I have spoken of the veined elms and their thousand 
thousand branches that divide like the nerves; from 
each of these nerves of living wood there has fallen its 
breathing lungs of leaf. Where are these million leaves? 
By night the worm has drawn them into his gallery 
beneath the surface, and they have formed his food to 
again become the richest guano, to help the succulent 
growth of green grass and corn. Merely for profit alone, 
the profit of this digested food for plants, the agriculturist 
should preserve some trees that their leaves may thus 
be applied. The despised worm, the lowly worm, is 
actually so exquisitely organised that the whole of its 
body is sensitive to light, and is as conscious of the ray 
as the pupil of your own eye. Here is great and good 
work like that of those classics, the manuscripts of 
which were the first to be copied by the early printers, 
and books like this would be well thumbed of the 
country reader. 
In a degree the interior of the country bears a certain 
resemblance to the state of Spain. Of that sunny land, 
travellers tell us the strangest inconsistencies of the 
people and natural products. It is an arid land, without 
verdure, nothing but prickly aloes and scattered orange 
groves, mere dots in a sunburnt expanse. Silver and 
