ALL RIGHTS RESERVED .] 
IRature IRotes : 
TEbe Selbonte Society’s flfcaga3tne. 
No. 203. NOVEMBER, 1906. Vol XVII. 
SERVANTS OF THE SOIL. 
By Augustus Henry Duvall. 
ATURE has many servants, but none are more useful 
to her than the servants of the soil. They are the 
chief supporters of all life, for the plant was the 
first nourishment given to the creatures of flesh and 
blood. If the lion was, from the very first, a beast of prey, 
his food must necessarily have been created before he came 
into existence. The deer lives upon the herbs of the field, so 
the plant must have come into existence before that which 
feeds upon it. Nature, then, has placed the plant at the head 
of the scale of existence. The plant is the oldest, and must 
needs have the most servants to wait upon it. 
The laws of Nature deal almost wholly with the question 
of life. There is no standing army as there is no common 
enemy, and yet there is a perpetual warfare carried on — war 
on the land, war in the water, war in the air. The great law 
is to keep down the increase of one plant or creature above 
another, and so maintain the balance of power in the world 
of Nature. To prevent utter annihilation of one species by 
another, the individual is either armed with weapons of defence, 
or rendered difficult to discern by being so painted as to har- 
monise with the surroundings. Communities, too, are often 
formed, as in the case of the ants, in which. those that are armed 
constitute a small army to protect the workers. 
Perhaps the most universal benefactor in Nature is the 
poor despised earthworm. This creature, loathed and trodden 
upon, is to the earth what the plough is to the farmer. It 
feeds on the microscopic animal and vegetable life in the soil 
in much the same way as the whale feeds on the animalcula 
in the ocean, but with the difference that the former passes 
the soil through its body, while the latter ejects the water 
