1882.J 
339 
Vegetable Soil. 
centre, while if it is level they appear— like a man walking 
— to side to the left hand. Sometimes when they meet a lot 
of obstacles they appear to have got completely bothered, 
and in the end to have returned to the side from whence they 
had started. 
Worms evidently require moisture to travel; whether they 
travel or not every wet night it is impossible to say from the 
tracks, as the track may be obliterated by subsequent rain ; 
but if there is rain in the early night the roads in the morn- 
ing will have numerous tracks. After rain on a road during 
daylight I have rarely observed worms travelling, and that 
only in very sheltered places, while during dews they do not 
appear to travel across such places, but on land clothed 
with grass or other vegetation they travel in dews at night, 
and both by night and day after rain. The ducks know 
this, and in summer go looking for the worms of an early 
morning or after rain in the day time. From what I have 
observed 1 suspecT the worms do not travel during heavy 
rains ; it is usually in the damp heat after the rain that so 
many of them are about. 
I have not as yet been able to learn why some tracks are 
smooth and straight while others are wriggled like the 
annelid tracks on the coal measure flags, but I suspect the 
wriggled tracks may be made by a different variety of worm. 
Usually, the worms I have watched travelling, let them be 
long or short, went straight, each forward movement being 
two-thirds the length of their body ; the rate of travelling 
being due to whether they extend and contract the body 
quickly or slowly. If a worm comes to a space such as a 
hollow between two flags, he feels across it with the point 
of his body, and if he can catch on with that he will draw 
himself across ; but if he cannot feel the other side he keeps 
screwing up the one-third of his body to try and elongate 
himself ; thus often when the space to be crossed is too wide 
he will overbalance himself and fall down into the hollow, 
and if the latter is a stream or pool of water he will pro- 
bably be drowned. 
It has been previously mentioned that when worms set 
out to travel they go straight forward if they meet with no 
obstacle ; the temporary rills and stream of water after a 
shower they do not appear to class among the latter, as 
nearly invariably they try to cross them, and thus many of 
them perish, they being carried down by the stream into one 
of the shallow pools, where afterwards numbers of them will 
be found dead. Many worms are also killed if the early 
portion of a night is wet and afterwards there is a frost, 
