340 
Vegetable Soil. [June, 
they being caught and killed by the cold while trying to cross 
an exposed place such as a walk or a road. Too much heat 
will also kill them, as during one of those hot showery days 
in March last (1882), I was watching some worms crossing 
an open shrubbery walk, and if the sun came out suddenly 
and strong immediately after one of the showers some of 
the worms were sure to give up and lie down and die. I 
have also observed that on one of those hot, bright, sunshine 
mornings not uncommon after a wet night, many dead 
worms will be found on walks and such like exposed places. 
Yet worms appear to be capable of travelling with great 
speed. In “ callows,” or the low-lying lands along rivers 
and lakes, and liable to be flooded during the rainy season, 
the worms appear to be able to retreat as fast as the flood 
rises, because at the margin of the flood they will be nearly 
innumerable. They also appear to be able to follow the flood 
as it rises and falls, and this is well known to the ducks, 
plover, and other wild fowl that here congregate,— -not, how- 
ever, solely to feed on the living worms, but also on the bodies 
of those that were caught by the flood, and swept by it on 
to its margin ; but if you examine the grass at the margin of 
a flood, the live worms seem to far exceed the dead ones, ex- 
cept in the case of a perfectly bare callow, when the dead 
ones may be in excess. 
Worms when travelling, if they meet with an obstacle 
rising suddenly before them, go round it if possible ; while if 
there is a sudden fall in their path, as before mentioned, they 
may fall over it : thus numbers are drowned in drains and 
other water-courses with steep perpendicular banks. When 
draining land it is a common practice to test the efficiency of 
the drains by opening, in places between them, short cuts or 
pits. Into these pits numbers of travelling worms will fall, 
to be drowned if the bottom of the pit is of such a nature 
that the water will lodge in it ; but if the bottom is friable 
the worms will burrow into it and throw up casts. I would 
here suggest that the worm-casts mentioned by Dr. Darwin 
(“ Vegetable Mould and Earth Worms,” pp. 184 et seq.) as 
having been thrown up by worms on the floors of Mr. Farrers’s 
excavations, were made by worms that fell into the excava- 
tions, and not by worms that were there previously. Dr. 
Darwin states that, after Mr. Farrers began to take notes, it 
was not for five days after the floor had been cleared, and that 
after a night of heavy rain the worm burrows were observed : 
this is exadtly what I would have expected, as, in the pre- 
viously mentioned pits in the drained fields, rarely will a 
worm or the track of a worm be found in them until there 
