the web oe IylBE —the soie 
99 
ture, not pretty to look upon, but which does a great 
service for the living world. 
This creature is the earthworm, and he makes the soil 
richer for plants, thereby helping man and beast. The 
earthworm lives in the soil, which he devours as he 
burrows through it. The earth passes through his body, 
and when it comes out it is richer than when it went in. 
He buries the dead leaves which, when they have been 
worked upon by the bacteria, make rich and ready food 
for the young plants of another spring. You and I know 
only one kind of earthworm, and he is never more 
than ten inches long, but there are more than a thousand 
kinds, each quite different from the other. In tropical 
countries people have seen worms from three to six 
feet long! 
The first person to study earthworms was Charles Dar¬ 
win, when he was a young student at Edinburgh, in Scot¬ 
land. A very queer subject for a student to choose, 
was it not? Yet this young student became one of the 
greatest men of the world, and what he learned about 
earthworms has been of much use to mankind. Young 
Charles Darwin would measure off a space upon the 
ground, then he would count the number of wormholes 
in this space, and figure out how many leaves these 
worms took down into their burrows. He found that in 
an acre of fine old fallow ground there may be half a 
