ORCHARDING WITH EARTHWORMS 77 



when magnified one thousand times, the results of such multi- 

 plication become still harder to grasp. If we were to magnify 

 a man to one thousand times his size, he would appear more 

 than one mile tall and a quarter-mile broad. On this point we 

 shall quote from Bacteria in Relation to Soil Fertility*, by Dr. 

 Joseph E. Greaves (M.S., Ph.D., Professor of Bacteriology and 

 Physiological Chemistry, Utah Agricultural College) : 



A bacterial generation is taken as the time required for a 

 mature cell to divide and the resulting daughter cells to reach 

 maturity. This process may be completed in half an hour at 

 times even more rapidly. Under less favorable circumstances it 

 may be much longer. It has been estimated that if bacterial mul- 

 tiplication went unchecked the descendants of one cell would in 

 two days number 281,500,000,000, and that in three days the 

 descendants of this single cell would weigh 148,356,000 pounds. 

 It has been further estimated by an eminent biologist that if 

 proper conditions could be maintained for their life activity, in 

 less than five days they would make a mass which would com- 

 pletely fill as much space as is occupied by all the oceans on the 

 .earth's surface, if the water had an average depth of one mile. 



Lest some reader becomes alarmed about bacteria, let us 

 state that they are self-limiting, the same as other life-forms, 

 being strictly limited by the amount of food available in their 

 environment. Also, the by-products of their own life-processes 

 accumulate rapidly and, as it were, they are soon stewing in 

 their own juice to their own destruction. Incidentally, it is 

 doubtful that, in the absence of the bacterial life of the soil, 

 the higher forms of animal life could exist. Like the earthworm, 

 bacteria are the unseen but ceaseless transformers of the end- 

 products of life back to the soil in the eternal cycle from 

 earth, through life, back to the earth. 



The above may at first appear as a digression from the 

 subject of orcharding. However, in considering the nutrition 



*P*ge 26. 



