LETTER XXXIX.
VERMES—ZOOPHYTA. (Worms and Zoophytes).
Worms.
The worm of worms, the one you know best, is the earthworm: so he shall have the honor of representing his group.
He will not take much time to describe. He is, in brief, a tube, open at both ends, so as to allow food to come in and go out. That is all.
I talked to you before about the ruminants, those food-manufacturers who are employed in cooking victuals for the stomach, and in disengaging albumen from the coarse materials among which it is apparently lost, so as to give it out again in a more acceptable form. The ruminant has other workmen under him, whom I keep in store for you as the last of the eaters, and who prepare the raw material for him*. These are the vegetables, who seek out the elements of albumen in earth, water, and air, those final sources of all alimentation. The earthworm also is a preparer, but in a peculiar way. Look along the garden-walks in summer-time, after rainy weather: you will see here and there, little heaps of earth moulded into small sticks, like dough which has been passed through a tube. [Footnote: M. Mace's account of the earthworm's life seems founded on the assumption that it extracts its nourishment from the earth itself, i.e., from inorganic matter, as vegetables do, to use his own words. But this notion is so entirely at variance with present received opinions, and also with the fact that the animal possesses a gizzard for digesting, as well as an intestinal canal, that it has been necessary to make considerable alterations in the description. To dismiss his theory of the primitive animal, etc., altogether, was, however, impossible, without omitting the whole chapter; but as young heads are not likely to trouble themselves about it, and it is very innocent in itself, it will do no harm; subject to this warning, that M. Macé has taken the earthworm for a more simply organised creature than it really is.—TR.] This is the damp soil which the worm has passed through his tube, after extracting from it, during its passage, the various elements of fertility he requires for the support of his life. This is what makes him so particularly fond of garden soil, because it is richer in animal and vegetable matter than common earth, and proves therefore more nourishing food. The worm, then, feeds on the fat of the earth, which he converts into azotic aliment for the use of moles, hens and Chinese. It only figures, it is true, for want of something better, in Chinese cookery, so profusely hospitable for all that; but the hen doats upon it, and you do not despise it yourself when it comes back to you in the form of a chicken's wing, that second transformation of the matter of which the soil of your garden is composed. It is told of certain savage tribes, the victims of constant scarcity, that they swallow little balls of clay in order to keep down their hunger; and during the great famines in India the distracted inhabitants may, we are told, be seen digging up the banks of the rivers to feed on the fertile clay in which the splendid vegetation of their country is developed. This is a desperate trial of that primeval system of alimentation which answers perfectly with the worm, but becomes a cruel mockery in the case of an organisation as exacting as that of man. Let us examine a little more closely, then, this wonderful tube.
At first sight one notices, to begin with, that it is composed of perfectly distinct rings, all quite alike. Inside as well as out each of these rings is an exact repetition of the other. They are all formed of circular muscles, enclosed between two coats, which extend from one to the other. A series of ganglions, arranged in the form of a necklace along the whole length of the body, set in motion the muscular system of the rings, each of which possesses its local centre of impulsion. Each feeds itself in its place from the nourishing juices with which it is in contact, the interior coat enjoying the double property of distilling digestive juices and absorbing digested ones. These juices pass through the muscular partition, and proceed to bathe the outer coat, which plays, at the same time, the part of coat and lung, and affords a passage to the air through its soft, damp surface, like that of gills. From all this results a fine red blood, such as we have not met with since we left the reptiles, and which is manufactured in all parts of the body at once.
Each of these rings, then, the worm's only organs, is a little eating machine to and for itself, and at the same time a little movement machine also; in fact, a complete animal. Each one could, if necessary, nourish itself and live apart; and this is what he really does. Learn hence, to despise nothing in nature. One tramples an earthworm under foot, and there below one's heel lies a little revealer of secrets, whose organisation throws the most unexpected light upon one of the greatest mysteries in our own life.
I said to you before, and I felt at the time that it was rather beyond you, that "each one of our organs is a distinct being, which has its particular nature and special office, its separate life consequently; and our individual life is the sum total of all these lesser lives, independent one of the other, but which nevertheless blend together, by a mysterious combination, into one common life, which is diffused everywhere, but can be apprehended nowhere in particular."
The study of the worm admirably explains this out-of-the-way sentence. And here observe my adjective—my out-of-the-way—for it is a case in point. We may call it a literary worm; a worm of four rings, each perfect in itself, but yet compounded together into a whole with its own idea.